Protecting warming lakes through climate-adaptive PES mechanisms

Abstract

Climate change can adversely impact the quality of environmental services provided under Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs, thereby reducing their effectiveness. In this paper, a modelling framework is developed to explore how PES negotiations between forestry and fishery-based communities may be affected when warming reduces the stock of fish as well as forest biomass growth rates. Under a PES arrangement, forestry-based communities afforest the lake's catchment region, which helps improve fish stock abundance through reduced sediment loading. When climate warming adversely impacts fish yields, the value of restoring degraded lands in the catchment region increases, making the negotiating powers of the fishing and forestry dependent communities dynamic. Results suggest that the prospect of a climate-driven negotiating power in the future calls for higher PES payments by the fishing community in order to incentivize early restoration. Warming could also affect forest biomass growth rates in the long run. However, findings from this study suggest that warming driven forest biomass growth rate decline may have a relatively lower impact on PES negotiations compared to the direct impact of warming on lake's fish productivity.