Payments For Ecosystem Services Projects Research Articles

Payment for ecosystem services in Peru: Assessing the socio-ecological dimension of water services in the upper Santa River basin

Increasing pressures on ecosystems in the Latin American region, as well as the adoption of multilateral conservation commitments, have led to the implementation of instruments that are economic in nature but oriented towards the recovery, conservation, and functioning of ecosystems such as Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES). In the Peruvian Andes, hydro-climatic factors and land-use changes are affecting the capacity of the ecosystems of the glaciated Cordillera Blanca to provide water services, in terms of both quality and quantity, to the main users of the Santa River basin. Thus, this study analyses how the socio-ecological interactions affect, and are affected by, the planned introduction of water-related PES in the Quillcay sub-basin, the most populated sub-basins along the Santa River basin. We use a conceptual model based on the current evolution of the water metabolism approach to integrate into a common language of analysis the multiple dimensions of water: water as an ecological fund, as a service, and as a political asset. To explore the interface of these three domains of analysis we rely on a mixed-method data collection: primary data collection through a stakeholder survey and interviews and a review of information from secondary sources. The result of our case study shows that both the ecological dimension and the social dimension affect on the PES project and vice versa. These complex interactions could result in the design of a mechanism in which not all stakeholders benefit equally. This raises the need to recognise the multidimensional nature of water in the design and implementation of policies, and the importance of identifying processes and barriers which affect the success of these policies without making invisible the direct effect they also have on social-ecological systems.

Nature conservation, indigenous rights, and settler colonialism: the politics of payments for ecosystem services in Mato Grosso do Sul (Brazil)

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are strongly criticized by political ecology scholars. Predominantly, their critique is rooted in notions of distributive justice, as they focus on the negative impact (e.g. land rights distribution) of PES for indigenous and other local communities. Many liberal supporters of PES do not deny that these problems are real. However, they put more emphasis on procedural justice and claim that PES may trigger an institutionalization of more inclusive dialogic procedures. As of yet, both strands of literature underestimate the impact of the postcolonial conditions in which many Pes projects are situated. This is where our article steps in. We investigate initial PES politics in Mato Grosso do Sul, a Brazilian province dominated by ongoing settler colonialism. Our research results indicate that the implementation of inclusive procedures in PES projects may partially mitigate the consequences of ongoing settler colonialism but that this more frequently fails because of its being embedded into the structures of a colonially shaped political economy. Although PES occasionally empower indigenous actors to confront local elites more effectively and strengthen the rights of indigenous women, the resulting transformations within the communities themselves are likely to weaken their political self-organization.

Community Perceptions of a Payment for Ecosystem Services Project in Southwest Madagascar: A Preliminary Study

Despite the popularity of Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes as a new paradigm to enhance conservation of natural resources, evidence of their benefits to people and nature is often illustrated from desk-based reviews, but rarely investigated from the local sites where they have been implemented. We investigated local perceptions of a PES scheme implemented in the Baie des Assassin’s mangroves of southwest Madagascar with particular focus on its perceived future effects. To meet our goal, we first collated socioeconomic and mangrove ecological information through extensive literature research, and key informant interviews with 35 peoples within the 10 villages surrounding the bay to be used as reference conditions. Following this, a workshop with 32 participants from local communities was conducted, using participatory scenario planning to predict the effects of the PES project, and to identify concerns surrounding its implementation. Local communities perceived the PES scheme as a potentially valuable approach for the sustainable management of their mangroves, and perceived that it would address major socioeconomic issues and mangrove management problems in the bay as a result of the carbon offsetting from their mangroves. We conclude that to achieve acceptance and good governance of a PES project by local communities, needs and concerns surrounding the implementation of the PES project need be addressed.

Aboveground and belowground tree biomass and carbon stocks in the miombo woodlands of the Copperbelt in Zambia

Globally, belowground biomass (BGB) accounts for 20–26% of total biomass, and as such it is an important carbon (C) pool for many vegetation types. However, large uncertainty exists for belowground biomass C compared to aboveground stocks. Using data from 108 destructively harvested trees belonging to 36 miombo species, we estimated root to shoot ratios, and developed models for estimation of aboveground biomass (AGB), BGB and total biomass C stocks in the Copperbelt province of Zambia. We also validated our models using independent datasets from elsewhere in Zambia and Malawi. The C fractions in wood ranged between 51.9 and 58.9%, which was higher than the IPCC default value. The root to shoot ratio was found to be 0.303. The analysis also demonstrated isometric scaling of BGB with AGB. According to cross-validation results, the model that incorporated wood density (ρ), diameter at breast height (D) and total stem height (H) formulated as AGB =0.093(ρD2H)0.97 *1.08 outperformed existing models developed for the miombo woodlands in Zambia. The best model for BGB was BGB = 0.476(AGB)0.88*1.126. Using the top-ranked models, the stand-level AGB stocks were estimated at 222.2 Mg ha−1, while BGB stocks were estimated at 52.4 Mg ha−1. Aboveground and belowground C stocks were 125.3 Mg ha−1 and 29.5 Mg ha−1, respectively. Total biomass C stocks were estimated at 152.1 Mg ha−1 or 558.3 Mg ha−1 CO2 equivalent sequestered in tree biomass. These estimates may be used as baseline data for future carbon management and for emerging payment for ecosystem services projects in miombo woodlands.

Payment Criteria and Mode for Watershed Ecosystem Services: A Case Study of the Heihe River Basin, Northwest China

Quantitative evaluation of the relationship between payment criteria and the amount of additional ecosystem services can improve the cost-effectiveness of payment for ecosystem services (PES) projects. This paper simulated additional water conservation (AWC) using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model, examined appropriate payment criteria, and matched different payment modes with local herders’ preferences in Northwest China. The results showed that if all the low-coverage grass areas were to be closed through PES projects, the actual payment criteria, 37 yuan/ha, would need to be increased eight times, which would be 302 yuan/ha. Along with that, annual AWC could reach 1.69 × 106 m3. If PES projects were implemented in all the low- and medium-coverage grass areas, payment criteria would need to be increased to 365 yuan/ha, and the annual AWC would reach 2.59 × 106 m3. There were scale economy effects in this range, because a 21% increase in the payment criteria would result in a 66% increase in the total AWC. The appropriate mode for herders above 40 years old is “cash + in-kind compensation” and “cash + capacity” for those below 40, due to the preferences varying in age.

Forest cover effects of payments for ecosystem services: Evidence from an impact evaluation in Brazil

We evaluate the effects of “Water and Forest Producers” (PAF), a payment for ecosystem services project, on forest cover outcomes in a watershed serving the Rio de Janeiro region of Brazil. We apply propensity score matching and regression to 81 beneficiary properties on 8848 ha and 398 control properties on 33,748 ha. We estimate the average treatment effect on the treated for changes in rates of reforestation and deforestation, and the resulting change in forest cover. Over the first 7 years of PAF (2010–2016), our results indicate that the project increased forest cover on participating properties by only 136 ha (95% confidence intervals of 8–265 hectares), or 1.5% relative to our estimate of the counterfactual scenario without PAF. Impacts on forest cover were caused mostly by reduced deforestation rather than reforestation. “Placebo” impact tests estimated using pre-intervention data indicate that our results are robust. The observed forest cover benefit came at the per-hectare cost of $32,963 ($16,917-$560,367) paid mostly with off-site mitigation funds. Semi-structured interviews with PAF beneficiaries suggest that the limited impacts of PAF may be the result of mostly enrolling properties that likely would have remained forested even without the project.

A Simulation Modeling of Forest Water Supply Under Community-Managed PES Schemes

This paper explores the design of a forestry-based payment for ecosystem services (PES) scheme, which improves stream water supply while simultaneously helping conserve forests and supporting livelihoods in communities of Uttarakhand, India. Under a PES arrangement, upstream communities reduce fuelwood harvesting to restore forest quality and improve stream flow in the downstream communities. Results suggest that such PES projects can play a crucial role in supporting forest conservation efforts and mitigating water scarcity in the region. For instance, PES-based payments required to meet the water needs of downstream communities can be three times lower than the costs of municipal water supply. Whereas, if communities do not receive any monetary incentives for reducing fuelwood harvesting, it results in a significant degradation of the forests in the long run. However, hydrological and ecological constraints can reduce the effectiveness of PES programs in the region. A high displacement of oak forests by the pine forests would lower the benefits from PES participation for the local communities. When the shifting species composition of forests also increases the failure risk of PES projects, optimal response requires further restricting fuelwood harvesting.

Identification of Non-economic Influencing Factors Affecting Farmer’s Participation in the Paddy Landto-Dry Land Program in Chicheng County, China

There is global enthusiasm for payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs to solve environmental problems, including in China. However, PES programs in China go against the principle of ‘voluntary transaction’, which weakens the influences of economic factors on farmers’ participation decisions and makes it hard to reveal their influence on farmers’ participation willingness. Using household survey data and a logistic regression model, this study attempts to understand the influencing factors of farmers’ decision-making on involvement in PES projects for hypothetical voluntary participation and focuses on whether the farmer would reject the program if the payment stopped. A surprising but promising result is found in the case of the Paddy Landto-Dry Land (PLDL) program in Chicheng County, China, wherein, apart from the negative impact of education and the positive effect of off-farm income, two non-economic factors play a significant role in farmers’ participation. The one is basic cognition, which negatively affects farmers’ participation, and the other is inner altruistic motivation, which positively contributes to the participation. In addition, the high proportion of reconversion to paddy land after the payment period threatens the long-term sustainability of the PLDL program. Faced with the low education and environmental cognition statuses in remote agricultural areas, increasing educational quality and promoting the popular awareness of PES programs in rural areas should be highlighted in sustaining the efficiency and effectiveness of PES programs in the long run.

Implications on equity in agricultural carbon market projects: a gendered analysis of access, decision making, and outcomes

Carbon market projects have focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, often at the expense of achieving sustainable development goals. A central pillar in sustainable development is equity, yet most projects pay little attention to equity implications for underrepresented farmers, especially women. Agricultural carbon market projects that explicitly seek to promote sustainable agricultural land management practices are quickly gaining attention worldwide for their promise to deliver the ‘triple-win’: adaptation, food security, and mitigation. Previous experience with other payment for ecosystem services projects indicate that women often are marginalized and their needs ignored. To address this gap, this case study examined the Kenya Agricultural Carbon Project with a focus on gender equity in access, decision making, and outcomes. Results show that women had less access to joining the project than men, because they did not have the same level of influence in decision making at a household level. At the project level, both men and women had little influence in establishing project requirements and potential benefits, as these were decided upon prior to farmer recruitment. Regarding outcomes, women tended to participate in more project activities, and would in return reap more nonmonetary benefits than men. However, the costs involved in achieving these benefits was nontrivial: women's farm labor time increased significantly due to the substantial time and effort required to implement sustainable agricultural land management practices. If agricultural soil carbon market projects are to achieve better outcomes by addressing equity issues, they need to pay special attention to gender and the differing needs of farmers—male, female, young, old, poor, and less poor—by involving them at the project design stage. Our findings show the importance of additional project benefits unrelated to carbon income for addressing the requirements of equity perceived by both the implementing agency and women themselves.

Application of payment for ecosystem services in China’s rangeland conservation initiatives: a social-ecological system perspective

The Chinese government has adopted Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) as a main approach for preventing or restoring rangelands perceived as undergoing degradation on a massive scale. Using the PES project, known as the ‘retire livestock, restore rangeland’ project in Alxa of Inner Mongolia as an example, the long-term ecological consequences of such projects is assessed, and the causes of the associated problems from the perspective of social-ecological system explored. Study findings demonstrate that PES, as used in the case study area, is unlikely to achieve the expected outcome of rangeland restoration in the long term. The root cause of such failure is that the PES approach focuses on end-point ecosystem services (outputs), while at the same time decoupling the feedbacks among social and ecological systems that are the key to generating such services. This drives the overall social-ecological system into an undesirable basin of attraction. It is concluded that a PES program for pastoral systems should aim to improve resilience of such a coupled social-ecological system to external shocks and changes, instead of simply maintaining ecological services without considering the origins of such services in the inter-relationship of humans and environment. It is argued that ‘Payment for Ecosystem Services’ should be displaced by ‘Payment for Social-ecological System Resilience’ in future policy discussions.

Payment for ecosystem services through renewable energy generation to promote community-based natural resource management in the Blyde in South Africa

Loss of biodiversity is putting the South African economy and the quality of life of its citizens at risk. Payment for ecosystem services (PES) is a way to incentivise conservation, community-based natural resource management and restoration of the environment. This article discusses a proposed PES project through the generation of hydro-electricity in the Blyde River Canyon Nature reserve. It argues that this proposed project could serve as an example for other PES projects and that it would strengthen community-based natural resource management, be beneficial to environmental conservation, counteract climate change, and provide socio-economic benefits to surrounding communities.

The quest for the “optimal” payment for environmental services program: Ambition meets reality, with useful lessons

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) have received considerable attention as a promising approach for correcting environmental externalities. Frequent shortcomings or outright lack of performance assessments of environmental interventions in general and PES projects in particular have resulted in recommendations for ”optimal” PES designs. Conditionality—paying service providers only if services or proxy inputs are delivered—and targeting—allocating payments based on service gains, provision costs or both—are central to such recommendations. We argue that a) true economic optimality is an unattainable PES objective and improving PES cost-effectiveness is a more realistic aspiration, and that b) current PES programs actually prevent cost-effectiveness analyses because they lack appropriate ecosystem service definitions and thus output measurements. We review the effects of conditionality on service flows and provide a framework for identifying the cost-effective level of conditionality stringency. We identify key analytical methods, data and analysis tools required to improve the cost-effectiveness of PES—or any ecosystem service—projects. Needed analytical concepts, metrics, and monitoring and modeling approaches often are sufficiently available for PES design to begin incorporating them. What is missing is their coherent application. Improving spatial-analytical and monitoring capacities should allow gradual implementation of modifications needed to improve PES cost-effectiveness.

How can ecologists help realise the potential of payments for carbon in tropical forest countries?

Summary 1. There is great interest among policy makers in the potential of carbon‐based payments for ecosystem services (PES) to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and protect forests in tropical countries. We discuss the contributions that ecologists can make to the interdisciplinary research required to inform the design of these initiatives. 2. First, we highlight the need to quantify the full range of processes that determine temporal variation in carbon stocks at a landscape‐scale due to cycles of forest disturbance and recovery. Second, we discuss the importance of understanding how the impact of climate change on the carbon stocks of intact forests may affect the emissions reductions achieved by any given project: we show that this may reduce the effectiveness of one carbon‐based PES project in southern Peru by 15%. We also discuss the need to assess project impacts on deforestation in the surrounding region and explore how different project designs influence the balance between the conservation of carbon and biodiversity. 3. The need to demonstrate emissions reductions or carbon storage to investors in carbon‐based payment schemes provides an imperative for monitoring their effectiveness. Monitoring will be a significant cost in any PES project and, together with project set‐up, on average accounts for more than 40% of project expenditure across six emerging Peruvian PES schemes. Ecologists will therefore have an important role in designing cost‐effective monitoring strategies. The impetus for monitoring also provides opportunities to carry out research addressing many of the uncertainties highlighted above. 4. Synthesis and applications. By working closely with a range of carbon‐based PES projects, ecologists can answer important fundamental questions related to the provision of ecosystem services and help improve the design of these schemes. The large number of projects currently being implemented provides an unprecedented opportunity to develop a proper evidence base for measuring and improving the practices that most successfully conserve tropical forest ecosystems.