Payments for ecosystem services (PES) typically reward landowners for managing their land to provide ecosystem services that would not otherwise be provided. REDD+—Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation—is a form of PES aimed at decreasing carbon emissions from forest conversion and extraction in lower-income countries. A key challenge for REDD+ occurs when it is implemente...

Economic growth has multiplied the environmental challenges faced by the People’s Republic of China but has also created opportunities, by increasing available funding for environmental management and conservation. At the nexus of these countervailing trends, policy makers have been experimenting with new approaches to environmental management under the broad heading of “eco-compensation”. Many...

Abstract Innovative services such as mobile payments are potentially transformative because they can increase access to financial services, especially in developing countries. However, innovations disrupt the ecosystem, prompting regulators respond different ways. These regulatory responses often have a significant impact on success of innovative services. Using Nigeria's approach case study, t...

The importance of the links between well-functioning ecosystems and human well-being are clearly evident in our age of rapidly changing environmental and socio-economic conditions. And yet, the role ecosystems play in supporting and sustaining human welfare has been only a marginal area of study to date in the field of economics (Dasgupta 2010). But this is starting to change. Millennium Ecosys...

Researchers aspire to strike a balance between the production and consumption of ecosystem services (ES) in agriculture for long-term farm sustainability. One approach is to provide payments for ecosystem services (PES) through government programs. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate ecosystem services and use the evaluated information to determine what policy designs could effectively induc...

Traditional grazing grounds near Amboseli National Park (Kenya) are being rapidly converted to cropland – a process that closes important wildlife corridors. We use a spatially explicit simulationmodel that integrates ecosystem dynamics and pastoral decision-making to explore the scope for introducing a ‘payments for ecosystem services’ scheme to compensate pastoralists for spillover benefits a...

To address devastating environmental crises and to improve human well-being, China has been implementing a number of national policies on payments for ecosystem services. Two of them, the Natural Forest Conservation Program (NFCP) and the Grain to Green Program (GTGP), are among the biggest programs in the world because of their ambitious goals, massive scales, huge payments, and potentially en...