Stefano Pagiola

Can the poor participate in payments for environmental services? Lessons from the Silvopastoral Project in Nicaragua

This paper uses data from a Payments for Environmental Services (PES) project being implemented in Nicaragua to examine the extent to which poorer households that are eligible to participate are in fact able to do so, an issue over which there has been considerable concern. The study site provides a strong test of the ability of poorer households to participate, as it requires participants to make substantial and complex land use changes. The results show that poorer households are in fact able to participate – indeed, by some measures they participated to a greater extent than better-off households. Moreover, their participation was not limited to the simpler, least expensive options. Extremely poor households had a somewhat greater difficulty in participating, but even in their case the difference is solely a relative one. Transaction costs may be greater obstacles to the participation of poorer households than household-specific constraints.

Agricultural intensification, local labor markets, and deforestation in the Philippines

This paper examines agricultural intensification and its impact on deforestation in a frontier region of the Philippines. Panel data covering the period 1994–2000 are used to study labor demand and resource reallocation in response to lowland irrigation development. Results illustrate how irrigation has led to changes in employment, incomes, and activities at the forest margin. Findings indicate that the off-farm employment opportunities created by irrigation development have helped to reduce rates of forest clearing. Although some initial employment gains have been reversed, wage-induced increases in agricultural productivity in the uplands have reduced forest pressure. Results show that lowland irrigation has had direct, indirect, and lagged effects on rates of forest clearing, and that a virtuous cycle may be at play, with irrigation leading to both poverty reduction and reduced forest pressure.

Paying for Biodiversity Conservation Services

Abstract One of the most important reasons for the degradation of biodiversity, in mountain areas and elsewhere, is that the people who make land use decisions often receive few or no benefits from biodiversity conservation. Understandably, therefore, they generally ignore potential biodiversity benefits when choosing land use practices. The end result is that biodiversity is often lost, as are many other off-site benefits such as the regulation of hydrological flows. Efforts to enhance biodiversity conservation need to take account of the constraints faced by individual land users, who decide what practices to adopt on their land. Over the years, a variety of efforts have been made to boost the profitability of biodiversity-friendly practices for land users, with mixed results. A further approach, which has received increasing attention in recent years, is to provide direct payments for the provision of environmental services such as biodiversity conservation. The simple logic of Payments for Environmental Services (PES) is that compensating land users for the environmental services a given land use provides, makes them more likely to choose that land use rather than another. The Regional Integrated Silvopastoral Ecosystem Management Project, which is being implemented by the World Bank with financing from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), is piloting the use of PES as a means of generating biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration services in watersheds at three sites in Colombia, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua.

Assessing the potential for synergies in the implementation of payments for environmental services programmes: an empirical analysis of Costa Rica

Payments for environmental services (PES) have been recognized as a promising mechanism for conservation, with the potential to contribute to social objectives such as poverty reduction. This paper outlines a simple framework for assessing the potential for synergies in the implementation of PES programmes, used to analyse the new watershed conservation funding (WCF) channelled through Costa Ricas national PES programme, Pago por Servicios Ambientales (PSA). The WCF financing can only be used in a limited number of watersheds. Given this constraint, the paper examines the mechanisms by which the WCF may potentially contribute to biodiversity conservation and to reducing social development gaps. Although there is significant spatial correlation among the priority areas targeted for the objectives of watershed conservation, biodiversity conservation and social development, the availability of the WCF per unit of land in most watersheds is limited compared to the PSA programmes prevailing payment rate of US

Can Payments for Watershed Services Help Finance Biodiversity Conservation? A Spatial Analysis of Highland Guatemala

64 ha −1 , potentially hindering the impact of the WCF on conservation and social development. The analysis helps guide the allocation of the PSA budget in a way that complements the WCF and improves the cost-effectiveness of the PSA budget.

Poor household participation in payments for environmental services in Nicaragua and Colombia

Abstract Payments for environmental services (PES) are a promising mechanism for conservation. PES could either provide additional funding for protected areas, pay land users to conserve biodiversity outside protected areas, or both. PES require a secure long-term source of financing to work effectively. Obtaining payments directly for biodiversity conservation is difficult, however. In most cases, water users are the most likely source, either directly or indirectly. Thus the potential for PES to help conserve biodiversity depends, in a large measure, on the degree to which areas of interest for conservation of water services overlap with areas of interest for conservation of biodiversity. This paper examines the extent of such an overlap in the case of highland Guatemala. The results show that this potential varies substantially within the country, with some biodiversity conservation priority areas having very good potential for receiving payments, and others little or none. Overall, about a quarter of all biodiversity conservation priority areas have potential for receiving payments. Thus PES are far from being a silver bullet for biodiversity conservation, but they can make a meaningful contribution to this objective.

Evaluation of the Permanence of Land Use Change Induced by Payments for Environmental Services in Quindío, Colombia

We evaluate the extent to which poor households are able to participate in Payments for Environmental Services (PES) scheme using data from a PES scheme implemented at two sites in Latin America. This allows us to compare environmental and livelihood impacts of PES across regions with different agronomic and socio-economic characteristics. In particular, one of our sites is composed almost entirely of poor or extremely poor households, while the other has households ranging from extremely poor to very well off. The results show that poorer households are in fact able to participate—indeed, by some measures they participated to a greater extent than better-off households. Moreover, their participation was not limited to the simpler, least expensive options. Extremely poor households had a somewhat greater difficulty in participating, but even in their case the difference is solely a relative one. Transaction costs may be greater obstacles to the participation of poorer households than household-specific constraints.

Preparing for REDD: The Forest Carbon Partnership Facility

The effectiveness of conservation interventions such as Payments for Environmental Services (PES) is often evaluated—if it is evaluated at all—only at the completion of the intervention. Since gains achieved by the intervention may be lost after it ends, even apparently successful interventions may not result in long-term conservation benefits, a problem known as that of permanence. This paper uses a unique dataset to examine the permanence of land use change induced by a short-term, asset-building PES program implemented in Quindío, Colombia, between 2003 and 2008. This the first PES program to have a control group for comparison. Under this program, PES had been found to have a positive and highly significant impact on land use. To assess the long-term permanence of these changes, both PES recipients and control households were re-surveyed in 2011, four years after the last payment was made. We find that the land use changes that had been induced by PES were broadly sustained in intervening years, with minor differences across specific practices and sub-groups of participants, indicating that these changes were in fact permanent. The patterns of change in the period after the PES program was completed also help better understand the reasons for the program’s success. These results suggest that, at least in the case of productive land uses such as silvopastoral practices under conditions such as those at the study site, asset-building PES programs can be effective at encouraging land owners to adopt environmentally-beneficial land management practices and that the benefits will persist after payments cease.

Designing Payments for Environmental Services in Theory and Practice: An Overview of the Issues

1. Deforestation and Emerging Greenhouse Gas Compliance Regimes: Toward a Global Environmental Law of Forests, Carbon and Climate Governance William Boyd 1 2. From The Hague to Copenhagen: Why it Failed Then and Why it Could be Different Federica Bietta 27 3. The European Union’s Position on REDD Financing Pedro Piris-Cabezas 39 4. International Forest Carbon in the US Congress: A Survey of Key Congressional Staff Lou Leonard, Raymond Kopp and Nigel Purvis 53 5. Preparing for REDD: The Forest Carbon Partnership Facility Benoît Bosquet, Stefano Pagiola and André Aquino 71 6. Incentives to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation: A Stock-Flow Approach with Target Reductions Andrea Cattaneo 93 7. Towards a Sound REDD: Ensuring Globally Consistent Reference Scenarios and Safeguarding Sustainability Co-Benefits Michael Obersteiner, Ewald Rametsteiner, Florian Kraxner, Ian McCallum, Kentaro Aoki, Hannes Boettcher, Steffen Fritz, Mykola Gusti, Petr Havlik, Georg Kindermann and Belinda Reyers 121 8. Financing Global Forests: The Eliasch Review Graham Floater and Duncan Stone 137 9. REDD and the Global Carbon Market: The Role of Banking Pedro Piris-Cabezas 151