Fair payments for effective environmental conservation

Exploring local perceptions and drivers of engagement in biodiversity monitoring among participants in payments for ecosystem services schemes in southeastern Mexico

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are widely applied incentive-based instruments with diverse objectives that increasingly include biodiversity conservation. Yet, there is a gap in understanding of how to best assess and monitor programs' biodiversity outcomes. We examined perceptions and drivers of engagement related to biodiversity monitoring through surveys among current PES participants in 7 communities in Mexico's Selva Lacandona. We conducted workshops among survey participants that included training and field deployment of tools used to monitor biodiversity and land cover, including visual transects, camera traps, acoustic recorders, and forest cover satellite images. We conducted pre- and postworkshop surveys in each community to evaluate changes in respondents' perceptions following exposure to biodiversity monitoring training and related field activities. We also reviewed existing research on participatory environmental management and monitoring approaches. One quarter of current PES participants in the study area participated in our surveys and workshops. The majority stated interest in engaging in diverse activities related to the procedural aspects of biodiversity monitoring (e.g., planning, field data collection, results dissemination) and acknowledged multiple benefits of introducing biodiversity monitoring into PES (e.g., knowledge and capacity building, improved natural resource management, and greater support for conservation). Household economic reliance on PES was positively associated with willingness to engage in monitoring. Technical expertise, time, and monetary constraints were deterrents. Respondents were most interested in monitoring mammals, birds, and plants and using visual transects, camera traps, and forest cover satellite images. Exposure to monitoring enhanced subsequent interest in monitoring by providing respondents with new insights from their communities related to deforestation and species' abundance and diversity. Respondents identified key strengths and weaknesses of applying different monitoring tools, which suggests that deploying multiple tools simultaneously can increase local engagement and produce complementary findings and data. Overall, our findings support the relevance and usefulness of incorporating participatory biodiversity monitoring into PES.

Small tradeoffs between social equity and conservation outcomes in a freshwater payment for ecosystem services scheme

Conservation programs around the world aim to balance social equity, economic efficiency, and conservation outcomes. Tradeoffs among these three objectives necessarily exist but have been quantified in only a handful of systems. Here, we use a multi-objective mathematical optimization model in a large, water-limited river basin to quantify these tradeoffs in a freshwater payment for ecosystem services (PES) program aimed at establishing environmental flows (e-flows). Across a range of budgetary and future climate scenarios, we find that tradeoffs between social equity and conservation outcomes are small. We also show that payment schemes in which incentives are allocated to a single water use sector are much less cost-effective than schemes in which incentives are allocated among multiple sectors. Thus, allocating payments equally among agricultural, municipal, and industrial sectors can be both more equitable and more cost-effective. Overall, our results illustrate how some carefully designed conservation programs may be able to achieve a triple bottom line of social equity, economic efficiency, and conservation effectiveness.

An environmental justice perspective on ecosystem services

Mainstreaming of ecosystem service approaches has been proposed as one path toward sustainable development. Meanwhile, critics of ecosystem services question if the approach can account for the multiple values of ecosystems to diverse groups of people, or for aspects of inter- and intra-generational justice. In particular, an ecosystem service approach often overlooks power dimensions and capabilities that are core to environmental justice. This article addresses the need for greater guidance on incorporating justice into ecosystem services research and practice. We point to the importance of deep engagement with stakeholders and rights holders to disentangle contextual factors that moderate justice outcomes on ecosystem service attribution and appropriation in socio-political interventions. Such a holistic perspective enables the integration of values and knowledge plurality for enhancing justice in ecosystem services research. This broadened perspective paves a way for transformative ecosystem service assessments, management, and research, which can help inform and design governance structures that nourish human agency to sustainably identify, manage, and enjoy ecosystem services for human wellbeing.

Governance Innovations for forest ecosystem service provision - Insights from an EU-wide survey

This paper analyses the occurrence of governance innovations for forest ecosystem service (FES) provision in the forestry sector in Europe and the factors that influence innovation development. Based on a European-wide online survey, public and private forest owners and managers representing different property sizes indicate what type of governance innovation activities they engage in, and why. To investigate forestry innovations as systems, the analysis focuses on biophysical, social and technical factors influencing innovation development. The results of our exploratory quantitative analysis show that most innovation activities identified are largely oriented towards biomass production. Accordingly, most forest owners implement efficiency-driven optimisation strategies for forest management and technological improvement for provisioning service supply, to generate income. In contrast, the provision of regulating and cultural services is not yet a prominent part of forestry innovation activities.Reasons are rooted in a market-oriented economic rationale focusing on timber production, a lack of financial resources to compensate for other FES provisions or institutions to provide backup and security to forest owners and managers for engaging in innovation development. Given that the provision of a wide range of FES is a politically well-established objective for forest management in Europe, a strategy is needed that helps to align actors and sectors for supporting and co-financing related forest management approaches and business models. The current revision of the forest related policy framework on EU level under the EU Green deal poses a window of opportunity for better fostering novel governance approaches for more sustainable FES provision.

Which pro-environmental farming behaviors should be priorities for funding? An approach based on matching ecosystem services (ESs) demand and supply

Eco-compensation (EC) for farmland conservation being implemented in China is a type of payments for ecosystem services (PES) scheme that seeks to balance ecosystem services (ESs) consumption and supply. Despite the growing body of literature on the integration of the demand for, and supply of ESs or the identification of mismatches between them, still many challenges remain to structurally integrate them in policy making facing fund-saving. Therefore, integrating ESs demand and supply at the micro-scale to provide novel insights into using compensation funds efficiently and optimizing the design of PES schemes deserves increasing attention. This study investigated an approach for integrating the demand for, and supply of farmland ESs, i.e., the public's preferences and farmers' pro-environmental behaviors related to farmland ESs, into the design of differentiated EC policies to obtain more ESs with lower input of EC funds. It proposed a theoretical framework and research approach to identify the pro-environmental farming behaviors that should be funded as priorities by matching micro farmland ES demand and supply in multiple scenarios. Then, using survey data collected from four cities in Hubei Province, China, and expert consultation data, empirical research was conducted. By matching the 'key ESs' on the demand side and 'specific ESs' on the supply side in scenarios I, II and III, eight most critical pro-environmental farming behaviors that should be funded as priorities for each scenario were identified. We maintain that the efficient and targeted use of EC funds can be better determined by matching ESs demand and supply from a micro-perspective since this approach provides insight and a framework to identify priorities for action. This approach could be extended to the conservation of different types of ecosystems as well as the design of corresponding PES schemes.

Ensuring a Post-COVID Economic Agenda Tackles Global Biodiversity Loss

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused dramatic and unprecedented impacts on both global health and economies. Many governments are now proposing recovery packages to get back to normal, but the 2019 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Global Assessment indicated that business as usual has created widespread ecosystem degradation. Therefore, a post-COVID world needs to tackle the economic drivers that create ecological disruptions. In this perspective, we discuss a number of tools across a range of actors for both short-term stimulus measures and longer-term revamping of global, national, and local economies that take biodiversity into account. These include measures to shift away from activities that damage biodiversity and toward those supporting ecosystem resilience, including through incentives, regulations, fiscal policy, and employment programs. By treating the crisis as an opportunity to reset the global economy, we have a chance to reverse decades of biodiversity and ecosystem losses.

Fair payments for effective environmental conservation

Incentive-based measures are increasingly popular to alleviate ongoing biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions from land use change. However, effectively using scarce conservation funds remains a major challenge. Using behavioral economic experiments in the buffer zone of a Vietnamese national park, we show that unfair payment distributions that are beyond land users’ control can reduce the environmental effectiveness of incentives, and that women exert more effort. Our study region is threatened by forest degradation and is part of the nationwide Vietnamese Payments for Forest Ecosystem Services program, making it an important and relevant context for improving the effectiveness of conservation measures. These results show that policymakers aiming for effective and efficient programs should pay close attention to fairness and gender.

Global efforts for biodiversity protection and land use-based greenhouse gas mitigation call for increases in the effectiveness and efficiency of environmental conservation. Incentive-based policy instruments are key tools for meeting these goals, yet their effectiveness might be undermined by such factors as social norms regarding whether payments are considered fair. We investigated the causal link between equity and conservation effort with a randomized real-effort experiment in forest conservation with 443 land users near a tropical forest national park in the Vietnamese Central Annamites, a global biodiversity hotspot. The experiment introduced unjustified payment inequality based on luck, in contradiction of local fairness norms that were measured through responses to vignettes. Payment inequality was perceived as less fair than payment equality. In agreement with our preregistered hypotheses, participants who were disadvantaged by unequal payments exerted significantly less conservation effort than other participants receiving the same payment under an equal distribution. No effect was observed for participants advantaged by inequality. Thus, equity effects on effort can have consequences for the effectiveness and efficiency of incentive-based conservation instruments. Furthermore, we show that women exerted substantially more conservation effort than men, and that increasing payment size unexpectedly reduced effort. This emphasizes the need to consider social comparisons, local equity norms, and gender in environmental policies using monetary incentives to motivate behavioral change.