Are Payments for Ecosystem Services necessary?

Payment schemes for ecosystem services can be a valuable tool to ensure their proper valuation and sustainable management.

For many developing countries, the loss of ecosystem services will be a barrier to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to reduce hunger, disease and poverty. Although today’s technology and knowledge can contribute to minimising the human impact on ecosystems, their potential is unlikely to be deployed fully until ecosystem services cease to be perceived as free and limitless and their full value taken into account.

Many ecosystem services are available freely to those who use them. A country could cut its forests and deplete its fisheries (for the selling of wood and fish), and this would show only as a positive gain to GDP . The degradation of these ecosystems is not reflected in the standard economic measures. Factoring in economic losses associated with the depletion of natural assets can significantly change the national balance sheet of individual countries, especially those with economies that are dependent on natural resources.

The proper valuation of environmental services requires incentives a for local stakeholders to act in ways that protect environmental services. PES can help make conservation the more attractive option for land users, thus inducing them to adopt it. The payment must obviously be more than the additional benefit to land users of the alternative land use (or they would not change their behavior).