I think, at this moment, with the state of the art, our ability to demonstrate the existence of ecosystem services is quite low leading to difficulties to establish schemes of payments for ecosystem services. From my point of view if you don’t have hard evidences about the existence of the services the payment scheme will be a failed transaction, it means a transaction where I don’t want to pay because I can not see the product or service I have to pay for. May recommendation is to work more on demonstrating the service and only if successfully demonstrated think about the payment scheme and its integration in the basin management process.

@Efraín Antonio Domínguez Calle

Your comments are really good. If I understand correctly,did you mean that there is a  need of some research study taking some most important indicators related to PES. Do you have any knowledge if any such study is being taken by some researchers?

Plz see the links below for your perusal

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/267/5201/1117

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167880905005268

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304380009008655

Dear Debashis, you had understood correctly... There are publications about the PES schemes, but few if nothing at all is devoted to the demonstration of the existence of the services. I think for many cases there is not any formal definition of what the regarded ecosystem service is, i.e. what does hydric regulation service mean? We are close to submit a manuscript about this issue (more related to the hydric regulation service and the role of vegetation on it) As soon as we will have something accepted I could send you the draft. I believe this is a new promising field of research.

It is good to know that some initiatives have been taken to quantify various services. According to me, the regulating services are still easy to understand but what about cultural services which addresses spiritual, aesthetic and inspirational services? How can we really quantify these parameters in terms of money?

You can apply the ecosystem approach by performing the mapping of ecosystem services in the watershed flow analyzing them and their variation over time. See Fisher et al 2013 Strengthening conceptual foundations: Analysing frameworks for ecosystem services and poverty alleviation research. Global Environmental Change 23 (2013) 1098-1111

We need to remember that it is not PES that determines what ecosystem services might be generated by a watershed, but land use within that watershed. PES is simply one possible instrument we might use to try to affect land use patterns. So we really have two separate questions: PES -> Land use, and Land use -> Services. In general, we know a fair amount about how land uses affect services, even though our knowledge is often not as precise as we would like. So if we understand how PES affects land use, we can have a reasonable understanding of how PES will affect services.

As an ecological rehabilitator I am curious as to how to establish a baseline of the value of ecological services? There is economic incentive to having clean water systems as people rely on drinking water to come from our watersheds. Yet, there isn't government funding nor policy that supports the need to provide people with clean water. There is the recreational value of clean watershed, but a lack of unity in the stakeholders to drive the legislation towards clean water support. The only unity is in the corporation farming industry that drives the decisions. Yet , there is long term economic incentives to holding our soil, water, and nutrients on site for all landowners. What is the value of the ecological services and where should the money come from? How to we get that source of money and the work needed done? 

Hi Debashis,

Could you please explain what you include in Eco System Services?

if your focus is for monitoring and evaluation then you may explore cost-benefit analysis - to demonstrate to stakeholders the net benefits of having a watershed. And that without it lesser economic benefits may be gained as compared with having it protected.

PES could just serve as financial mechanism if the buyer of water provisioning services agrees to pay/voluntary pay for the improved protection/conservation of watershed. If that could then be established you can do monitoring and evaluation of this PES scheme through the CBA tool (to show whether the conditions under the agreement are met or the extent of compliance are valued)

cheers.