Selling two environmental services: In-kind payments for bird habitat and watershed protection in Los Negros, Bolivia

Marketing several environmental services from a single area can help access diverse sources of funding and make conservation a more competitive land use. In Bolivia's Los Negros valley (Department of Santa Cruz), bordering the Amboró National Park, 46 farmers are currently paid to protect 2774 ha of a watershed containing the threatened cloud-forest habitat of 11 species of migratory birds. In this payment for environmental services (PES) scheme, annual contracts prohibit tree cutting, hunting and forest clearing on enrolled lands. Farmer-landowners as service providers submit to independent yearly monitoring, and are sanctioned for non-compliance. Facilitated by a local NGO, Fundación Natura Bolivia, one service buyer is an international conservation donor (the US Fish and Wildlife Service) interested in biodiversity conservation. The second service users are downstream irrigators who likely benefit from stabilized dry-season water flows if upstream cloud forests are successfully protected. Individual irrigators have been reluctant to pay, but the Los Negros municipal government has on their behalf contributed ~ US$4500 to the scheme. The negotiated payment mode is annual quid pro quo in-kind compensations in return for forest protection. Predominantly, payments are made as “contingent project implementation”, transferring beehives supplemented by apicultural training. With regard to service provision, environment committees and education programs have increased awareness in downstream communities of the probable water-supply reduction effect of continued upstream deforestation. External donors have funded subsequent studies providing basic economic, hydrological and biodiversity data, and covered PES start-up (~ US$40,000) and running transaction costs (~ US$3000 per year over the last three years). The greatest challenges in the development of the PES mechanism have been the slow process of building trust between service buyers and providers, and in achieving clear service-provision additionality.     

Decentralized payments for environmental services: The cases of Pimampiro and PROFAFOR in Ecuador

Few payment for environmental services (PES) schemes in developing countries operate outside of the central state's umbrella, and are at the same time old enough to allow for a meaningful evaluation. Ecuador has two such decentralised, consolidated experiences: the five-year old Pimampiro municipal watershed-protection scheme and the twelve-year old PROFAFOR carbon-sequestration programme. We describe and compare the two cases, using a common PES definition and methodology, drawing on both primary interview-based information and secondary data. We find that both schemes have been relatively effective in reaching their environmental objectives, in terms of having probably high additionality levels and low leakage effects. A strong focus on the targeted environmental service and a strong degree of conditionality seem to be two key factors explaining these achievements. Although neither scheme has targeted poverty alleviation or other side objectives, both are likely to have improved PES recipients' welfare, mostly through higher incomes. We highlight several observations with more generalised relevance and lessons for the design of PES schemes.     

ENDANGERED SPECIES CONSERVATION ON PRIVATE LAND

This paper analyzes the effect of alternative institutional arrangements on the conservation of endangered species and economic activity on private land. Because a landowner does not capture the full value of species conservation, her preferences on land use will not coincide with social preferences. Under current law, the landowner has incentives to invest in lowering conservation value and to deny access to regulators in order to prevent collection of information. Paying compensation corrects many of these perverse incentives. An alternative approach is to limit the ability of landowners to affect the regulatory outcome. Whether it is better to entice landowners to make socially efficient decisions by paying compensation or to limit the ability of landowners to affect outcomes through changes in the regulatory regime depends on both practical implementation difficulties and distributive justice considerations.     

The efficiency of voluntary incentive policies for preventing biodiversity loss

Habitat loss is a primary cause of loss of biodiversity but conserving habitat for species presents challenges. Land parcels differ in their ability to produce returns for landowners and landowners may have private information about the value of the land to them. Land parcels also differ in the type and quality of habitat and the spatial pattern of land use across multiple landowners is important for determining the conservation value of parcels. This paper analyzes the relative efficiency of simple voluntary incentive-based policies in achieving biodiversity conservation objectives. This topic is important not just for biodiversity conservation but for any effort to provide a public good requiring coordination across multiple decision-makers who have some degree of private information. We develop a method that integrates spatially explicit data, an econometric model of private land-use decisions, landscape simulations, a biological model of biodiversity as a function of landscape pattern, and an algorithm that estimates the set of efficient solutions. These methods allow us to simulate landowner responses to policies, measure the consequences of these decisions for biodiversity conservation, and compare these outcomes to efficient outcomes to show the relative efficiency of various policy approaches. We find substantial differences in biodiversity conservation scores generated by simple voluntary incentive-based policies and efficient solutions. The performance of incentive-based policies is particularly poor at low levels of the conservation budget where spatial fragmentation of conserved parcels is a large concern. Performance can be improved by encouraging agglomeration of conserved habitat and by incorporating basic biological information, such as that on rare habitats, into the selection criteria.     

The working for water programme: Evolution of a payments for ecosystem services mechanism that addresses both poverty and ecosystem service delivery in South Africa

A payments for ecosystem services (PES) system came about in South Africa with the establishment of the government-funded Working for Water (WfW) programme that clears mountain catchments and riparian zones of invasive alien plants to restore natural fire regimes, the productive potential of land, biodiversity, and hydrological functioning. The success of the programme is largely attributed to it being mainly funded as a poverty-relief initiative, although water users also contribute through their water fees. Nevertheless, as the hydrological benefits have become apparent, water utilities and municipalities have begun to contract WfW to restore catchments that affect their water supplies. This emerging PES system differs from others in that the service providers are previously unemployed individuals that tender for contracts to restore public or private lands, rather than the landowners themselves. The model has since expanded into other types of ecosystem restoration and these have the potential to merge into a general programme of ecosystem service provision within a broader public works programme. There is a strong case for concentrating on the most valuable services provided by ecosystems, such as water supply, carbon sequestration, and fire protection, and using these as ‘umbrella services’ to achieve a range of conservation goals. The future prospects for expansion of PES for hydrological services are further strengthened by the legal requirement that Catchment Management Agencies be established. These authorities will have an incentive to purchase hydrological services through organisations such as WfW so as to be able to supply more water to their users.     

A dynamic approach to PES pricing and finance for interlinked ecosystem services: Watershed conservation and groundwater management

A theory of payment for ecosystem services (PES) pricing consistent with dynamic efficiency and sustainable income requires optimized shadow prices. Since ecosystem services are generally interdependent, this requires joint optimization across multiple resource stocks. We develop such a theory in the context of watershed conservation and groundwater extraction. The optimal program can be implemented with a decentralized system of ecosystem payments to private watershed landowners, financed by efficiency prices of groundwater set by a public utility. The theory is extended to cases where land is publicly owned, conservation instruments exhibit non-convexities on private land, or the size of a conservation project is exogenous. In these cases, conservation investment can be financed from benefit taxation of groundwater consumers. While volumetric conservation surcharges induce inefficient water use, a dynamic lump-sum tax finances investment without distorting incentives. Since the optimal level of conservation is generated as long as payments are correct at the margin, any surplus can be returned to consumers through appropriate block pricing. The present value gain in consumer surplus generated by the conservation-induced reduction in groundwater scarcity serves as a lower bound to the benefits of conservation without explicit measurement of other benefits such as recreation, biodiversity, and cultural values.     

Spatial targeting of payments for environmental services: A tool for boosting conservation benefits

Payments for environmental services (PES) have become an increasingly popular market-based instrument to translate external, non-market environmental services into financial incentives for landowners to preserve the ecosystems that provide the services. However, lack of spatial differentiation in the targeting mechanism may lead to efficiency losses. Addressing this challenge, we construct an applied site selection tool, which takes into account three variables that vary in space: environmental services provided, risks of losing those services, and participation costs. Using data from Costa Rica's Nicoya Peninsula, we empirically test the tool's potential to increase the financial efficiency of the forest-focused PES program in place. Results show that, given a fixed budget, efficiency increases radically if per hectare payments are aligned to landowners' heterogeneity in participation costs, involving opportunity, transaction and direct costs of protection, respectively. Selecting sites based on environmental service potential also moderately increases efficiency. Overall additionality could in the best case be doubled, but remains generally limited due to current low deforestation risks prevailing in Costa Rica. To take advantage of the high efficiency potentials of flexible payments, we propose inverse auction systems as a cost-effective approach for the determination of micro-level participation costs.     

Motivation for conservation: Assessing integrated conservation and development projects and payments for environmental services in La Sepultura Biosphere Reserve,Chiapas, Mexico

In order to achieve conservation and development, direct strategies, such as Payments for Environmental Services (PES), have been claimed to be potentially more effective than indirect strategies, like Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs). However, PES have raised some concerns on the commodification of nature and the potential replacement of non-chrematistic forms of valuing ecosystems. This article evaluates PES and ICDPs in La Sepultura Biosphere Reserve, Mexico, by analyzing the programs' fund allocation, examining conservation perceptions based on 731 structured interviews and presenting a detailed assessment of ICDP/PES preferences in a community with the longest participation in both schemes. People receiving PES tend to make the future of conservation contingent on monetary and utilitarian reasons, this preference increasing with the number of years receiving PES. These are preferred for their directness and short-term results, although raising concerns about the little social capital they generate. ICDPs are appreciated for arising environmental awareness, being linked with long term conservation, productive capacity and social capital building. Negative perceptions of ICDPs are related to past economic failures. Our results suggest that the real issue is not PES vs. ICDPs but how to combine them to find the proper sequence while reinforcing intrinsic value-based attitudes.     

Asymmetric information and contract design for payments for environmental services

In contractual relationships involving payments for environmental services, conservation buyers know less than landowners know about the costs of contractual compliance. Landowners in such circumstances use their private information as a source of market power to extract informational rents from conservation agents. Reducing informational rents is an important task for buyers of environmental services who wish to maximize the services obtained from their limited budgets. Reducing informational rents also mitigates concerns about the “additionality” of PES contracts because low-cost landowners are least likely to provide different levels of services in the absence of a contract. Paying low-cost landowners less thus makes resources available for contracts with higher opportunity cost landowners, who are more likely to provide substantially different levels of services in the absence of a contract. To reduce informational rents to landowners, conservation agents can take three approaches: (1) acquire information on observable landowner attributes that are correlated with compliance costs; (2) offer landowners a menu of screening contracts; and (3) allocate contracts through procurement auctions. Each approach differs in terms of its institutional, informational and technical complexity, as well as in its ability to reduce informational rents without distorting the level of environmental services provided. No single approach dominates in all environments. Current theory and empirical work provides practitioners with insights into the relative merits of each approach. However, more theoretical work and experimentation in the laboratory and the field are necessary before definitive conclusions about the superiority of one or more of these approaches can be drawn.     

生态环境服务付费的国际经验及其对中国的启示

生态环境服务付费在国际上引起关注的三个背景是:(1)生态问题的凸显;(2)新古典经济学意识形态的流行;(3)保护环境和减少贫困一石两鸟的期望。与生态环境服务付费理念相似的概念,在我国一般被称为生态补偿。生态补偿在我国受到重视是国情使然。这一国情与上述三个背景有共通之处,也有独特之处。这决定了生态环境服务付费的国际经验对我国生态补偿有潜在的借鉴意义,同时生态补偿又有中国特色。生态环境服务付费的国际经验对我国的主要启示是:(1)需要提高下游(环境服务需求方)的生态补偿意识;(2)公平的生态补偿机制要求考虑上游保护生态环境的机会成本;(3)权属明晰化是使生态补偿机制长久可持续的前提;(4)政府应鼓励地方创新形式多样的补偿形式;等等。     

Barriers to Massachusetts forest landowner participation in carbon markets

U.S. forests, including family-owned forests, are important carbon sinks and sources for carbon sequestration. Family forest owners constitute a significant portion of the overall forestland in the U.S., but little is known about their preferences for participating in carbon sequestration programs. The goal of this research is to understand what motivates Massachusetts family forest owners to participate in carbon markets. The study estimates the probability these landowners would engage in carbon sequestration programs using data from a survey of 930 Massachusetts family forest owners. Results from a random effects ordered probit indicate that under a carbon scenario similar to the current voluntary scheme, very few of these landowners would be interested in participating. Supply analysis indicates these landowners are more influenced to participate by factors other than price. Regression analysis results suggest that survey respondents are concerned about early withdrawal penalties, additionality requirements, and contract length. Forest owner harvesting plans, opinions about forest usage, and beliefs about climate change all play a significant role in the decision to participate. The study suggests that policy makers should consider the reasons behind these low participation rates, because private forest owners could play a pivotal role in the carbon sequestration potential of forests.     

Payments for environmental services as an alternative to logging under weak property rights: The case of Indonesia

Decentralization reforms in Indonesia have led to local communities negotiating logging agreements with timber companies for relatively low financial payoffs and at high environmental cost. This paper analyzes the potential of payments for environmental services (PES) to provide an alternative to logging for these communities and to induce forest conservation. We apply a game-theoretical model of community-firm interactions that explicitly considers two stylized conditions present in the Indonesian context: (i) community rights to the forest remain weak even after decentralization, and (ii) the presence of logging companies interested in the commercial exploitation of the forest. Intuition may suggest that PES design should focus on those communities with the lowest expected payments from logging deals. However, we show that these communities may not be able to enforce a PES agreement, i.e., they may not be able to prevent logging activities by timber companies. Moreover, some communities would conserve the forest anyway; in these cases PES would not lead to additional environmental gains. Most important, the introduction of PES may increase a community's expected payoff from a logging agreement. A failure to consider this endogeneity in expected payoffs could lead to communities opting for logging agreements despite PES, simply allowing communities to negotiate better logging deals. Our results indicate that PES design is a complex task, and that the costs of an effective PES system could potentially be much higher than expected from observing current logging fees. Using data collected in Indonesia on actual logging fees received by communities, we illustrate how the theoretical results could be used in empirical analysis to guide PES design. Our results are likely to be useful in other cases where local people make resource use decisions but have weak property rights over these resources, and where external commercial forces are present. The results highlight the importance of understanding the details of the local context in order to design PES programs appropriately.     

Compensation payments for habitat heterogeneity: Existence, efficiency, and fairness considerations

Compensation payments for voluntary conservation measures have become an important tool for biodiversity conservation worldwide. Each year substantial financial resources are spent on such measures, particularly in the context of agri-environmental schemes. In Europe, a debate has started on whether this money is spent effectively. In response to this debate it has been suggested that a portfolio of measures leading to habitat heterogeneity be implemented. Although payments for heterogeneous conservation measures have been analysed in the literature, it has never been questioned that payments can be designed in a way that encourages enough land users to carry out each conservation measure within a portfolio of measures. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that such payments do not always exist. Moreover, in cases where payments for habitat heterogeneity exist the payment scheme may require overcompensation of the land users, posing a limit to both efficiency and fairness considerations.     

The CAMPFIRE programme in Zimbabwe: Payments for wildlife services

Payments for environmental services (PES) have been distinguished from the more common integrated conservation and development projects on the grounds that PES are direct, more cost-effective, less complex institutionally, and therefore more likely to produce the desired results. Both kinds of schemes aim to achieve similar conservation outcomes, however, and generally function in analogous social, political and economic environments. Given the relative novelty of PES, what lessons can be learnt and applied from earlier initiatives? In this paper, we describe the evolution over the first 12 years (1989-2001) of Zimbabwe's Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE), a community-based natural resource management programme in which Rural District Councils, on behalf of communities on communal land, are granted the authority to market access to wildlife in their district to safari operators. These in turn sell hunting and photographic safaris to mostly foreign sport hunters and eco-tourists. The District Councils pay the communities a dividend according to an agreed formula. In practice, there have been some underpayments and frequent delays. During 1989-2001, CAMPFIRE generated over US$20 million of transfers to the participating communities, 89% of which came from sport hunting. The scale of benefits varied greatly across districts, wards and households. Twelve of the 37 districts with authority to market wildlife produced 97% of all CAMPFIRE revenues, reflecting the variability in wildlife resources and local institutional arrangements. The programme has been widely emulated in southern and eastern Africa. We suggest five main lessons for emerging PES schemes: community-level commercial transactions can seldom be pursued in isolation; non-differentiated payments weaken incentives; start-up costs can be high and may need to be underwritten; competitive bidding can allow service providers to hold on to rents; and schemes must be flexible and adaptive.     

Designing a payments for ecosystem services (PES) program to reduce deforestation in Tanzania: An assessment of payment approaches

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs aim to improve environmental outcomes by providing direct incentives to land managers for the provision of ecosystem services. Participation in PES programs is voluntary, so effective program design requires careful consideration of farmers' preferences. This study quantifies such preferences using a choice experiment. The study site is the East Usambara Mountains, Tanzania, an internationally recognized ‘biodiversity hotspot.’ We assess preferences for four payment approaches: constant and variable annual cash payments to individual farmers, a constant annual cash payment to a village fund on behalf of farmers, and an upfront manure fertilizer payment. We find that the manure fertilizer payment was statistically significant in motivating farmer participation while the group payment was non-significant. In addition, the relationship between the likelihood of participation and the stringency of conditionality is surprisingly non-linear. In a test of external validity, average willingness to accept (WTA) values are found to be similar to the average opportunity cost of maintaining land uses consistent with conservation objectives.     

Cost-effective species conservation in exurban communities: A spatial analysis

Exurban areas have increasingly become zones of conflict as conservation and development compete for the same finite land resources. Conversion of natural areas to land dominated by human use results in loss, degradation, and fragmentation of wildlife habitat which often lead to species endangerment or even extinction. Recently, reserve site selection models have begun to integrate spatial attributes in order to design more compact and connected reserve networks that are thought to improve long-term species persistence. While these models are a good step forward to designing conservation reserve networks, they might not be adequate for use in exurban areas that consist of heterogeneous mosaics of land uses where habitat fragmentation already exists and not all parcels are available for preservation. This paper presents a species conservation framework that expands upon traditional reserve site selection models in three ways. First, because of the focus on exurban areas, the framework used here allows for land conversion within core habitat patches. Second, the framework provides a more robust assessment of connectivity among patches by accounting for land-use heterogeneity in the dispersal matrix. And third, the framework explicitly incorporates species population dynamics. We apply our conservation framework to the case of pond-breeding salamanders in an exurban community in Rhode Island, USA. Comparisons are made between the outcomes for uniform conservation policies and more flexible policies that accommodate ecological and economic heterogeneity. As expected, policies that offer more flexibility in the decision-making process are less costly in terms of foregone development. Conservation planners should consider core habitat patches, dispersal matrix, and spatial scale in their decision making. By not assessing the potential impact of dispersal barriers, reserve site selection models will result in conservation plans that may not protect species over the long term, particularly for species residing in highly fragmented landscapes such as those found in many exurban communities.     

Protected areas, wildlife conservation, and local welfare

The establishment and expansion of protected areas in Africa have been motivated by the aspiration of increased wildlife abundance. However, during the past decades, this practice has been subject to a massive debate. While some claim that protected areas have failed in preserving African wildlife, others claim that existing protected areas are successful. This paper adds to this debate by presenting a bio-economic analysis of protected area expansion. The model considers a hunter-agrarian community located on the border of a protected area. An expansion of the protected area means less land for agricultural cultivation and hunting. Depending on the economic conditions of these activities, the model demonstrates that protected area expansion may reduce the degree of wildlife conservation. In addition, it may reduce the welfare of the local people.     

人力资本和社会资本能提高失地农民就业水平吗*——基于北京地区连续跟踪的调查数据

本文以北京地区失地农民为研究对象,基于2008年和2015年两次失地农民社会调查数据,通过失地农民的就业机制分析,构建Logistic回归模型并进行“稀有事件偏差”检验,分析在城镇化进程中,人力资本和社会资本对失地农民就业机会、职务晋升和就业行业的影响。研究发现,在失地农民获得非农就业机会方面,2008年人力资本和社会资本对其有着显著的正向影响,2015年人力资本和政治面貌的影响不显著,不过求职途径和户籍的影响显著;在职务晋升方面,两次调查结果基本一致,政治面貌、受教育程度和职业培训对其有着显著的正向影响,求职途径、户籍的影响不显著;在就业行业方面,随着时间的推进,2015年失地农民的就业行业选择出现了新的变化,有44%的失地农民开始到公共部门就业,2008年人力资本、政治面貌和求职途径变量对其进入传统行业就业无显著影响 ,2015年开始凸显,特别是对其进入公共部门就业有着显著正向影响,而户籍对进入传统行业有着正向影响,对进入公共部门无影响。     

Geography,land inequality and regional numeracy in Europe in historical perspective

We find a relationship between geographic factors and numeracy in more than 300 regions of Europe around the year 1900. We argue that the distribution of land ownership is a plausible mechanism, given that it is related to the geographic factors under study. Consistent with theoretical studies in the Unified Growth Theory framework, we find that inequality in land distribution has a negative correlation with human capital formation as landowners did not have incentives to promote educational institutions or were not willing to pay the necessary taxes. This study explains a substantial share of the differences in development gradients between rural European regions in a historical perspective.     

我国失地农民利益受损的制度逻辑

如何通过完善农地制度来保障失地农民的利益事关我国失地农民的生存发展和社会稳定.通过对失地农民利益受损的机理进行剖析发现,集体土地产权模糊、产权缺乏排他性、委托代理问题以及征地制度中存在的公益性用地界限不清等制度性因素共同促成了失地农民利益受损.因此,有效保障我国失地农民的合法权益就要从我国农地制度进一步改革入手,明晰集体土地产权、赋予农民长期的承包经营权、严格区分公益性和经营性用地的界限、构建多层次的失地农民社会保障体系等措施.