Payment for Ecosystem Services from Forests

By Jennifer Alix-García, Hendrik Wolff. Social Science Research Network, 2014

129 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Every year from 2000 to 2010, our planet lost native forests roughly the size of Costa Rica (FAO 2010). This rapid deforestation has dramatically changed the chemical composition of the world’s atmosphere, the level of biodiversity, and the presence of vegetation key to maintaining watershed function and preventing landslides. There has been a boom in the design of local and international policy instruments to prevent further deforestation and to encourage forest growth. This article reviews the theory and evidence surrounding forest-related payment for ecosystem services (PES) schemes intended to slow and reverse deforestation. We cover the most recent work touching on a range of issues related to PES programs, including research on targeting, contract design, environmental effectiveness, challenges to program implementation, spillovers, and distributional considerations of conditional cash transfers. We also highlight areas of potential future research.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1508f4dbfc515274f1761898c89b25eeeb0b98d2

Citations in the corpus

• Parks versus PES: Evaluating direct and incentive-based land conservation in Mexico (2017, unknown): “Compared to the literature on protected areas, there are substantially fewer rigorous evaluations of payments for ecosystem services, particularly large-scale national programs (Pattanayak et al. 2010, Alix-Garcia and Wolff 2014).”