Designing payments for environmental services in theory and practice: An overview of the issues

Payments for environmental services (PES) have attracted increasing interest as a mechanism to translate external, non-market values of the environment into real financial incentives for local actors to provide environmental services (ES). In this introductory paper, we set the stage for the rest of this Special Issue of Ecological Economics by reviewing the main issues arising in PES design and implementation and discussing these in the light of environmental economics. We start with a discussion of PES definition and scope. We proceed to review some of the principal dimensions and design characteristics of PES programs and then analyze how PES compares to alternative policy instruments. Finally, we examine in detail two important aspects of PES programs: their effectiveness and their distributional implications.PES is not a silver bullet that can be used to address any environmental problem, but a tool tailored to address a specific set of problems: those in which ecosystems are mismanaged because many of their benefits are externalities from the perspective of ecosystem managers. PES is based on the beneficiary-pays rather than the polluter-pays principle, and as such is attractive in settings where ES providers are poor, marginalized landholders or powerful groups of actors. An important distinction within PES is between user-financed PES in which the buyers are the users of the ES, and government-financed PES in which the buyers are others (typically the government) acting on behalf of ES users. In practice, PES programs differ in the type and scale of ES demand, the payment source, the type of activity paid for, the performance measure used, as well as the payment mode and amount. The effectiveness and efficiency of PES depends crucially on program design.     

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.     

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.     

Payments for environmental services in Costa Rica

Costa Rica pioneered the use of the payments for environmental services (PES) approach in developing countries by establishing a formal, country-wide program of payments, the PSA program. The PSA program has worked hard to develop mechanisms to charge the users of environmental services for the services they receive. It has made substantial progress in charging water users, and more limited progress in charging biodiversity and carbon sequestration users. Because of the way it makes payments to service providers (using approaches largely inherited from earlier programs), however, the PSA program has considerable room for improvement in the efficiency with which it generates environmental services. With experience, many of these weaknesses are being gradually corrected as the PSA program evolves towards a much more targeted and differentiated program. An important lesson is the need to be flexible and to adapt to lessons learned and to changing circumstances.     

Towards a unified scheme for environmental and social protection: Learning from PES and CCT experiences in developing countries

Environmental protection and poverty alleviation in the developing world are usually heralded as joint objectives. However, these two goals are often associated with different sectoral policy instruments. While so−called payments for environmental services (PES) are increasingly being promoted for environmental protection, poverty alleviation is increasingly addressed by conditional cash transfers (CCT) program. These instruments although aimed to achieve distinct objectives have a number of similarities and challenges in their design and implementation phases. This paper elaborates on these similarities and develops a unifying generic framework that is used to discuss the extent to which both approaches could be unified.     

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。     

REDD+ as Result‐based Aid: General Lessons and Bilateral Agreements of Norway

The initiative known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) officially became part of the international climate agenda in 2007. At that time, REDD+ was an idea regarding payment to countries (and possibly also projects) for reducing emission from forests, with funding primarily from carbon markets. The initiative has since become multi‐objective in nature; the policy focus has changed from a payments for environmental services (PES) approach to broader policies, and international funding primarily originates from development aid budgets. This “aidification” of REDD+ has made the program similar to previous efforts using conditional or results‐based aid (RBA). However, the experience of RBA in other sectors has scarcely been addressed in the REDD+ debate. The alleged advantages of RBA are poorly backed by empirical research. This paper reviews the primary challenges in designing and implementing a system of RBA, namely, donor spending pressure, performance criteria, reference levels, risk sharing, and funding credibility. It then reviews the four partially performance‐based, bilateral REDD+ agreements that Norway has entered with Tanzania, Brazil, Guyana, and Indonesia. These agreements and the aid experience provide valuable lessons for the design and implementation of future REDD+ mechanisms.     

Do low-income housing subsidies increase the occupied housing stock?

A necessary condition for justifying a policy such as subsidized low-income housing, either via tenant-based rental assistance or construction of public or private projects, is that it has a real effect on market outcomes. In this paper, we examine one aspect of the real effect of subsidized housing—does it increase the housing stock? If subsidized housing raises the quantity of occupied housing per capita, either more people are finding housing or they are being housed less densely. On the other hand, if subsidized housing merely crowds-out equivalent-quality low-income housing that otherwise would have been provided by the private sector, the housing policy may have little real effect on housing consumption. Using both Census place and MSA-level data from the decennial census and from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, we ask whether housing markets with more subsidized housing also have more total housing, after accounting for housing demand. We find that government-financed units raise the total number of units in a market, although on average one government-subsidized unit adds only one-third to one-half of a unit to the total housing stock. There is less crowd-out in more populous markets, and more crowd-out in places where there is less excess demand for subsidized housing, as measured by the number of government-financed units per eligible person. Tenant-based housing programs, such as Section 8 Certificates and Vouchers, seem to be more effective than project-based programs at targeting subsidized housing units to people who otherwise would not have their own.     

Paying for the hydrological services of Mexico's forests: Analysis, negotiations and results

Mexico faces both high deforestation and severe water scarcity. The Payment for Hydrological Environmental Services (PSAH) Program was designed to complement other policy responses to the crisis at the interface of these problems. Through the PSAH, the Mexican federal government pays participating forest owners for the benefits of watershed protection and aquifer recharge in areas where commercial forestry is not currently competitive. Funding comes from fees charged to water users, from which nearly US$18 million are earmarked for payments of environmental services. Applicants are selected according to several criteria that include indicators of the value of water scarcity in the region. This paper describes the process of policy design of the PSAH, the main actors involved in the program, its operating rules, and provides a preliminary evaluation. One of the main findings is that many of the program's payments have been in areas with low deforestation risk. Selection criteria need to be modified to better target the areas where benefits to water users are highest and behavior modification has the least cost, otherwise the program main gains will be distributive, but without bringing a Pareto improvement in overall welfare.     

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.