Abstract
Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES), a market-based policy instrument for the conservation and environmental management that aims to coordinate the interests of upstream and downstream ecosystem service (ES) stakeholders, has been adopted worldwide. However, the success of PES depends on the desirability of programs targeting rural communities and smallholders. In this article, an agent-based sustainability perspective on PES was proposed and applied to examine a PES case study of the Converting-Orchard-to-Forest (COF) project in Dongjiang Headwater Watershed (DHW). We used household interview-based information and associated secondary data to quantitatively assess the environmental consequences and livelihood impacts of the COF project. The findings show that: (1) the COF participants at the upstream suffered from substantial income loss due to decreased orchard area; (2) the participants’ chemical fertilizer and compound fertilizer consumption was larger than their nonparticipating counterparts; and (3) the COF participants and nonparticipants increased the material assets and reduced their fuelwood use and increased the liquefied petroleum gas. Our findings suggest that, because of the significant income loss experienced by the upstream participants, the COF program is unsustainable with the participants very likely to cultivate the orchard again once the COF project ends. The research provides insightful information regarding PES implementation and sustainability of similar PES schemes.
Highlights
Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) as a promising policy instrument tries to translate the positive externality of non-marketable natural systems into an economic incentive of ecosystem services (ES) providers, such that they will strengthen conservation efforts and provide environmental public goods [1,2]
We presented an agent-based coupled infrastructure system (CIS) framework for assessing PES sustainability (Figure 1)
Due to COF implementation, participant households’ orchard area decreased sharply from 0.694 ha to 0.085 ha in the two periods (Figure 3A). Both the participant and nonparticipants have reduced their orchard area at different levels
Summary
Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) as a promising policy instrument tries to translate the positive externality of non-marketable natural systems into an economic incentive of ecosystem services (ES) providers, such that they will strengthen conservation efforts and provide environmental public goods [1,2]. In watershed-based PES projects, downstream water users typically provide financial compensation directly to upstream communities for water resources management and conservation efforts to adopt land-use decisions that are assumed to prevent deforestation and enhance hydrologic services [3,4,5,6,7,8]. Current PES schemes aim to understand how to cultivate the implementation to improve efficiency and effectiveness and address tradeoffs to secure human well-being [13,14,15,16,17].
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