Could be a nice suggestion to solve externalities problems in well defined contexts.

Ready to look at that and share a partnership.

Michel Moreaux

[email protected],and, [email protected]

I work on forest ecosystem services and farm ecosystem services. In Ghana I work with women groups(350) to till land sustainably. It is hard to change their current management practices and believe PES could be a good incentive for female farmers to change management practices, especially when the new activity increases farm productivity. Neighbourhood relationship plays a critical role in effective PES. Look forward to share ideas and partner in this regard.!!! Cosmas

You could have a look at that paper:

I live in the Philippines and many of the commercial fish species start off life in the mangroves around the coasts, yet mangroves are continually under threat across the region. One PES scheme idea is to place a levy on trawlers fishing in Philippine waters and use it to support mangrove establishment and maintenance. Not easy to enforce, I'm sure, but worth looking into.

I am a Malawian and have worked extensively with farmers in Malawi over the years. Paying farmers for soil conservation is a good idea and perhaps it will trigger the interest of many farmers to put their effort into this. However, the sustainability of this system depends on what they do with the payment. If the payment enables the farmer to buy fertilizer or seeds, I suggest that the farmers be linked to a value chain system that can help them to access output market so that any excess production fetch good prices. This way the farmers can plough back the money into production and continue benefiting from the initial 'coupon' . I have seen a number of initiatives which pay farmers collapsing when programs come to an end due to lack of exit strategies. In this case your program may not necessarily be the one to implement the value chain but partnering with others can help. I am sure there several initiatives that can be willing to partner on a win-win situation.

We are in the final revision of a manuscript where we evaluated the Costa Rican program of payments for environmental services inside an Indigenous territory. Since land is communal in these territories, the payments are administered by a local governing body and the money is used for the collective good, as opposed to individual interests. Such payments have significantly supported social capital, allowing locals to develop important skills to defend their resources from mining, hunting, or deforestation threats, supported also with acquired legal and political knowledge financed by the payments.

Ecosystem services valuation (ESV) is the process of assessing the contributions of ESs to certain sustainable scales, fair distribution, and efficient allocation of space and resources, like having an appropriate mix of land-use types across scales such that ESs can be maintained. There is also the need to move from general estimates provided by Costanza et al. (1997) to more specific statements at regional and local scales. To effectively manage changes in the flow of goods and service we need to incorporate ESV into resource management decisions. However, moving from general statements about the tremendous benefits nature provides to people to credible, quantitative estimates of ESs has proven difficult. Among the crucial issues for obtaining reliable, quantitative estimates of ESs are those related to scales and interaction between services. Goods and services that humans obtain from ecosystems may span different scales in space and time, and can interact with one another in complex, often unpredictable ways. Improvements in the understanding of the patterns at multiple spatial and temporal scales at which ecosystem services operate are likely to provide more realistic ES values and also to improve ecosystem-based management practices. In order to introduce more efficient and reliable PES schemes, Costanza (2008) has recently classified the spatial characteristics of 17 ESs listed in Costanza et al. (1997) based not only on the scale of operation of the service, but also on the spatial proximity of service delivery to human beneficiaries. Services like carbon sequestration, which is an intermediate input to climate regulation, is classified as global non-proximal. This is because the atmosphere is generally well-mixed and removing carbon dioxide (or other greenhouse gases) at any location is equivalent to removing it anywhere else. However, at local or even regional scale, in certain areas and during certain periods of the year, conditions of stratified thermal inversion may occur in the lower atmospheric layers resulting in respiratory distress and infections in people. Local proximal services, on the other hand, are dependent on the spatial proximity of the ecosystem to the human beneficiaries. Use values for PES schemes will be determined by local patterns of land use, human population settlements and proximity to beneficiaries. The recreational function of a landscape or ecosystem, for example, is not only defined by the land cover of a specific location (e.g. natural area) but depends also on accessibility properties (e.g. distance to roads) and the characteristics of the surrounding landscape. Directional flow-related services are dependent on the flow from upstream to down-stream as is the case for water supply and water regulation. This kind of service is the basis for ecosystem service payments established in 1996 in Costa Rica to induce landowners to provide ecosystem services. In this case, downstream users pay upstream landowners to maintain forest cover on their land to benefit from protection of upstream ecosystem services. Other examples of this kind of service can be found where, like in Italy, the economic value of non-marketed services provided by forests for watershed protection and slope stability against landslides, can be very high. i believe that classifying the spatial characteristics of ESs could be a sound basis for making PES schemes effective.

Given agricultural expansion and intensification in the Great Plains associated with high corn prices, grasslands and tree groves are being tore up as well as widespread tile draining, grasslands and wetlands ecosystem functions are disappearing. One idea we are assessing is the impact of promoting switchgrass biofuel water ways as a way to promote grassland conservation in these important areas (think erosion, wildlife, sediment and carbon capture, water quality, water retention, smoothing out the hydrographs to buffer flood effects….these are even more important in crop areas with relatively high relief). Cellulosic biofuel harvest is usually done late in the fall after senescence’s (birds have fletched from the nest, perennial grasses have translocated carbohydrate (carbon) and nitrogen reserves to basal stems and roots so minor impact on plant vigor, soil carbon (grasses store most of their carbon below ground), and wildlife. This also rewards land managers with long term ecosystem and soil sustainability goals with economic income (otherwise good land stewards are economically punished, relative to fence row to fence row cropping) and would reduce economic incentives (vouchers, subsidies) to bring returns closer to those of corn/soybean returns.

Diversity concerns about switchgrass monocultures are real but 1) maybe as cellulosic refinement matures, species mixtures (think prairie cord grass) can be employed and 2) struggling to retain or reintroduce any perennial grass adds significantly to regional diversity in areas dominated by intensive agriculture.

Coming back to the initial question - we developed once an approach for turning the service to better manage soils and store more carbon in agriculture into certificates that can be traded. Here, an idea could be that the more neighboring parcels perform such management (and can prove to do it over longer period), the higher is the value of such a certificate. Could be motivating and drive community actions, but of course there is a need for sufficient monitoring and proving schemes to ensure that the intended success (increased C-Sequestration, amount over time) is achieved and cannot be deteriorated by subsquent mismanagement. This is not fully solved.

Dear Tim,

One first strategy could be to make use of participatory certification procedures to recognize sustainable agricultural practices.

The marketing strategies would be designed in accordance to local citizens' profile, their preferences and attitudes.

Just to give you an idea: these recognized 'sustainable farmers' would pressumably sell more food. It it happens, they could invest part of the extra income they received onorganizing a cheap lunch. This would create a stronger social connectivity, and higher social recognition of the 'sustainable' farmers by the local society. This finally would be reflected in more sales and more number of 'sustainable farmers' (= more protection of environment).

I would we have to talk about it more in deep.

Regards,

Alfredo J. Escribano.