Payments for environmental services and the poor: concepts and preliminary evidence

By Sven Wunder. Environment and Development Economics, 2008

470 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT Based on observations from all three tropical continents, there is good reason to believe that poor service providers can broadly gain access to payment for environmental services (PES) schemes, and generally become better off from that participation, in both income and non-income terms. However, poverty effects need to be analysed in a conceptual framework looking not only at poor service providers, but also at poor service users and non-participants. Effects on service users are positive if environmental goals are achieved, while those on non-participants can be positive or negative. The various participation filters of a PES scheme contain both pro-poor and anti-poor selection biases. Quantitative welfare effects are bound to remain small-scale, compared to national poverty-alleviation goals. Some pro-poor interventions are possible, but increasing regulations excessively could curb PES efficiency and implementation scale, which could eventually harm the poor. Prime focus of PES should thus remain on the environment, not on poverty.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Ocean Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Exploring the links between equity and efficiency in payments for environmental services: A conceptual approach (2010, background): “However, this kind of PES might be competing with other poverty relief programs (Turpie et al., 2008) or ‘conditional cash transfers’ which are not linked to conservation efforts or environmental considerations (Wunder, 2008).”
Efficiency of Payments for Environmental Services: Equity and additionality in a case study from a Biosphere Reserve in Chiapas, Mexico (2011, background): “Although PES, as a fundamentally conservation tool, were not designed as a poverty alleviation strategy (Wunder, 2008), it still has an impact on the poor.”
Incentives, conditionality and collective action in payment for environmental services (2014, background): “In the aggregate, these costs will be much higher for a large number of small contracts than a small number of large contracts (Pagiola et al. 2005; Wunder 2008; Huang et al. 2009).”
Payments for environmental services as neoliberal market-based forest conservation in Vietnam: Panacea or problem? (2012, background): “to promote social goods and pro-poor development (Bulte et al., 2008; Neef and Thomas, 2009; Pagiola et al., 2008; Wunder, 2008).”
Community Participation and Benefits in REDD+: A Review of Initial Outcomes and Lessons (2013, result): “Our findings are consistent with Barbier and Tesfaw’s [13] hypotheses about conditions for win-wins in REDD+ as well as Wunder’s [33] conjecture that PES programs are likely to produce only modest income benefits but may help the rural poor increase their tenure security.”
Evaluating the outcomes of payments for ecosystem services programmes using a capital asset framework (2014, background): “The potential of PES to strengthen livelihood development strategies rests upon the financial capacity of programmes to support household and community needs through the provision of payments (Wunder, 2008; Pascual et al., 2010; Narloch et al., 2011).”
Managing the Miombo Woodlands of Southern Africa: Policies, Incentives and Options for the Rural Poor (2010, unknown): “PES schemes, seldom straightforward, pose their own challenges, especially for reducing poverty (Wunder, 2008).”
Payments for ecosystem services: From local to global (2010, background): “Associated with this approach is the idea that PES should prioritize efficiency over poverty alleviation (Pagiola et al., 2005; Wunder, 2008).”
Incentives to Sustain Forest Ecosystem Services: A Review and Lessons for REDD (2009, background): “These up-front conditions include economic, institutional, informational and cultural conditions (Wunder 2008b).”
Research, part of a Special Feature on Compensation and Reward for Environmental Services in the Tropics Principles for Fairness and Efficiency in Enhancing Environmental Services in Asia: Payments, Compensation, or Co-Investment? (2010, background): “…and provide land managers with appropriate incentives to opt for land use practices that maintain or enhance the level of environmental services (ES) [1] that are expected, but have not so far been appreciated, by "downstream" or ES beneficiaries (Asquith and Wunder 2008, Porras et al. 2008).”
Designing payments for environmental services in theory and practice: An overview of the issues (2008, background): “To the extent that participation in a PES program is voluntary, there is a prima facie presumption that participants are at least no worse off than they would be without the PES program.31 Were this not the case, they could simply decline to participate (Pagiola et al., 2005; Wunder, 2008).”
Trends and future potential of payment for ecosystem services to alleviate rural poverty in developing countries. (2010, background): “Biodiversity conservation services are highly location specific; buyers are generally interested in conserving only those habitats and species that are rare, endangered, in excellent condition, or have high potential for restoration (Wunder 2008).”
Direct conservation payments in the Brazilian Amazon: Scope and equity implications (2010, methodology): “Tentative transaction-cost estimates for the state of Mato Grosso, for example, suggest that implementation, monitoring, and verification costs (ranging between 0.15 and 0.53R$/tCO2) would not compromise the competitiveness of REDD supply (Börner and Wunder, 2008).”
Payments for ecosystem services as commodity fetishism (2010, background): “Wunder (2008), for example, highlights that an excessive focus on poverty can deviate attention from those areas where the loss of ecosystem services is more acute and where payments could make a difference in changing unsustainable land-use patterns.”
Hard choices: Making trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and human well-being (2011, background): “For example, managing for ecosystem services, and creating payment systems for the maintenance of those services are approaches that have received substantial interest as a way of conserving natural resources and addressing livelihood issues for the rural poor (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005;”
Taking stock: A comparative analysis of payments for environmental services programs in developed and developing countries (2008, background): “Finally, in particular in the case of water services to large cities, one should not overlook the health improvements that multiple poor service users can obtain from cleaner or more regularly supplied drinking water (Wunder, 2008a).”