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BC3 Ikerbasque Professor´s Contribution in "Science".
Science has echoed an important debate about the role of market-based instruments for environmental conservation given the rising popularity of Payments for Ecosystem Services (so-called PES), which are increasingly being used as an economic incentive mechanism for environmental conservation in poor areas of developing countries.
In a recent Policy Forum in Science (4 November 2011) Anne Kinzig et al.’s paper “Paying for ecosystem services—Promise and peril”, identify a series of key conditions that would need to be satisfied to meet the cost-effectiveness goal of PES. Recently, in the 10th February 2012 issue, Science added a contribution to the Policy Forum on PES by Ikerbasque Professor Unai Pascual from the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) and University of Cambridge, and Dr Esteve Corbera from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Barcelona.
In their entry (“Ecosystem services: heed social goals”) they argue that PES —including payment related to clean development mechanisms and REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation)— need to heed social goals to be cost-effective in the longer run.
They claimed that PES schemes need to be socially legitimate. Their view reflects the increasing evidence by PES practitioners on the ground that beyond the need for short term cost-effective targeting of the beneficiaries of the payments, PES also need to be socially fair and allow for the participation of beneficiaries in their design and implementation. Pascual and Corbera further argue that these conditions are equally necessary to legitimize PES as a market based instrument and that by adding transparency and legitimacy to PES schemes their conservation goals will be more likely to be met in the longer run.