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The Efficiency of Payments for Environmental Services in Tropical Conservation
SVEN WUNDER
Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Embrapa Amazônia
Oriental—Convênio CIFOR, Trav. Dr. Enéas Pinheiro s/n CEP 66.095–100 Bel´em,
Brazil, email: s.wunder@cgiar.org
Abstract
Payments for environmental services (PES) represent a new, more direct way to
promote conservation. They explicitly recognize the need to address difficult
trade-offs by bridging the interests of landowners and external actors through
compensations. Theoretical assessments praise the advantages of PES over
indirect approaches, but in the tropics PES application has remained incipient.
Here I aim to demystify PES and clarify
its scope for application as a tool for tropical conservation. I focus on the
supply side of PES (i.e., how to convert PES funding into effective conservation
on the ground), which until now has been widely neglected. I reviewed the PES
literature for developing countries and combined these findings with
observations from my own field
studies in Latin America and Asia. A PES scheme, simply stated, is a voluntary,
conditional agreement between at least one “seller” and one “buyer” over a
well-defined environmental service—or a land use presumed to produce that
service. Major obstacles to effective PES include demand-side limitations and a
lack of supply-side know-how regarding implementation. The design of PES
programs can be improved by explicitly outlining baselines, calculating
conservation opportunity costs, customizing payment modalities, and targeting
agents with credible land claims and threats to conservation. Expansion of PES
can occur if schemes can demonstrate clear additionality (i.e., incremental
conservation effects vis-`a-vis predefined baselines), if PES recipients’
livelihood dynamics are better understood, and if efficiency goals are balanced
with considerations of fairness. PES are arguably best suited to scenarios of
moderate conservation opportunity costs on marginal lands and in settings with
emerging, not-yet realized threats. Actors who represent credible threats to the
environment will more likely receive PES than those already living in harmony
with nature. A PES scheme can thus benefit both buyers and sellers while
improving the resource base, but it is unlikely to fully replace other
conservation instruments.
Keywords: economic incentives, integrated conservation and development
projects, landowner compensation, stewardship
Published in Conservation Biology, 2006 (early online) (for more information
about this work, pls contact the journal, or s.wunder@cgiar.org).
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En español
