Designing payments for ecosystem services: Lessons from previous experience with incentive-based mechanisms

Designing payments for ecosystem services: Lessons from previous experience with incentive-based mechanisms.

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) policies compensate individuals or communities for undertaking actions that increase the provision of ecosystem services such as water purification, flood mitigation, or carbon sequestration. PES schemes rely on incentives to induce behavioral change and can thus be considered part of the broader class of incentive- or market-based mechanisms for environmen...

Revealing pathways from payments for ecosystem services to socioeconomic outcomes

Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48823, USA. College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province 310058, China. Key Laboratory of Southwest China Wildlife Resources Conservation,Ministry of Education, ChinaWest Normal University, Nanchong, Sichuan Prov...

Payments for ecosystem services: From local to global

Could Payments for Ecosystem Services Create an "Ecosystem Service Curse"?

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) have received much praise and are increasingly perceived as a promising tool to ensure the protection of global ecosystems as well as being able to help alleviate poverty in areas rich in ecosystem services. Given current trends, the scale of payments is likely to grow, creating new circumstances within which ecosystem services will be managed. In this dyna...

Fairly efficient, efficiently fair: Lessons from designing and testing payment schemes for ecosystem services in Asia

Payment for ecosystem services (PES) is commonly defined as a market-based environmental policy instrument to efficiently achieve ecosystem services provision. However, an increasing body of literature shows that this prescriptive conceptualization of PES cannot be easily generalized and implemented in practice, and that the commodification of ecosystem services (ES) is problematic and may lead...