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"Money alone not enough to sustain environmental payment schemes, study finds"
[By Whit Mason in blog.cifor.or]
On paper, it is a simple premise: Improve environmental management by financially rewarding the people responsible for conservation.
This concept, known as payment for ecosystem services (PES, for short), has won many supporters among policymakers desperate to achieve tangible ecological benefits with tight budgets. PES schemes are now used globally, to incentivize conservation of valuable watersheds, endangered species and threatened forests.
But as with any paradigm, reality is more complex — and money alone can’t buy success, a new study suggests. ‘Soft variables’ may seem tangential to our pressing conservation goals, but evidence suggests that they are really important to shaping outcomes — how people feel, relate, engage matters in very tangible ways.
In a recent paper in the journal BioScience, “Social Equity Matters in Payment for Ecosystem Services,” the authors argue that a narrow focus on efficiency and maximizing conservation budgets can actually come at a steep cost for conservation.
The study, led by researchers at the Basque Center for Climate Change and the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and supported by the European Union EcoFINDERS project, highlights emerging tensions between efficiency and equity in the design of PES schemes. The authors argue that social equity dimensions — including the ability to participate in and shape schemes, the recognition of diverse local rights, and the fair distribution of costs and benefits — are often overlooked in the design.
Read the whole post: Source Blog CIFOR