Emerging Markets For Ecosystem Services

Practical ideas provided by a case study of the Panama Canal Watershed Exciting opportunities await the use of market mechanisms for protecting forest ecosystems. However, questions remain on how to best apply these mechanisms. Emerging Markets for Ecosystem Services: A Case Study of the Panama Canal Watershed provides an integrated, interdisciplinary methodological approach for evaluating market opportunities for watershed services, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity protection. Using the Panama Canal Watershed as a case study example, this probing resource addresses the main questions often asked about the various practical aspects of the emerging markets for ecosystem services, including quantifying value, payment structure, and equitable distribution of benefits. Environmental issues are often at odds with economic and business concerns. Emerging Markets for Ecosystem Services examines practical strategies to integrate diverse aspects into coherent strategies that benefit all. A scientific overview of the science and current knowledge provides a solid foundation to build policy and positive direction using the Panama Canal Watershed as an example. This unique resource sheds useful light on the challenges and provides insightful recommendations for areas struggling with ecosystem issues and the application of market mechanisms. This text is extensively referenced and includes several tables to clearly illustrate data. Topics in Emerging Markets for Ecosystem Services include: an overview of carbon sequestration in natural forests, exotic plantations, native plantations, and agroforestry systems policy tools to help reduce barriers to selling carbon credits alternatives for increasing demand for land-use-based carbon sequestration actions to encourage land managers to protect water quantity and quality receiving full value of watershed protection approaches to bioprospecti

The Creation of Markets for Ecosystem Services in the United States is a detailed analysis of the most advanced efforts to create markets for ecosystem services in the United States. With the help of in-depth case studies of three well-known attempts to create such markets––in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, the Ohio River basin and the Willamette River basin––the book explains why very few of these markets have actually succeeded even after close to two decades of much scholarly enthusiasm, significant federal funding and concerted efforts by NGOs, government agencies and private businesses. Based on interviews, policy analysis and participatory observation, three features of markets for ecosystem services emerge as particularly problematic. First, the logic of displacement or the idea that particular elements of an ecosystem can be separated and traded across landscapes or watersheds runs counter to political interests, environmental beliefs and people's connections to specific places. The second problem is that of measurement. Quantification methods embed a range of often contentious assumptions and decisions about what counts when restoring ecosystems. The third problem is related to participation in environmental decision-making.

Founded on the core notion that we have reached a turning point in the governance, and thus the conservation, of ecosystems and the environment, this edited volume features more than 20 original chapters, each informed by the paradigm shift in the sector over the last decade. Where once the emphasis was on strategies for conservation, enacted through instruments of control such as planning and ‘polluter pays’ legislation, more recent developments have shown a shift towards incentive-based arrangements aimed at those responsible for providing the environmental services enabled by such ecosystems. Encouraging shared responsibility for watershed management, developed in Costa Rica, is a prime example, and the various interests involved in its instauration in Java are one of the subjects examined here.

Global Biodiversity Finance sets out the case for scaling up Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) at the international level. The book explores how International Payments for Ecosystem Services (IPES) can help capture the global willingness-to-pay for

The Law and Policy of Ecosystem Services is the first comprehensive exploration of the status and future of natural capital and ecosystem services in American law and policy. The book develops a framework for thinking about ecosystem services across their ecologic, geographic, economic, social, and legal dimensions and evaluates the prospects of crafting a legal infrastructure that can help build an ecosystem service economy that is as robust as existing economies for manufactured goods, natural resource commodities, and human-provided services. The book examines the geographic, ecological, and economic context of ecosystem services and provides a baseline of the current status of ecosystem services in law and society. It identifies shortcomings of current law and policy and the critical areas for improvement and forges an approach for the design of new law and policy for ecosystem services. Included are a series of nine empirical case studies that explore the problems caused by society’s failure to properly value natural capital. Among the case study topics considered are water issues, The Conservation Reserve Program, the National Conservation Buffer Initiative, the agricultural policy of the European Union, wetland mitigation, and pollution trading. The Law and Policy of Ecosystem Services is a groundbreaking look at the question of whether and how law and policy can shape a sustainable system of ecosystem service management. It is an accessible and informative work for faculty, students, and policy makers concerned with ecology, economics, geography, political science, environmental studies, law, and related fields.

There has been a growing public interest in the role and value of natural ecosystems and how they contribute to our quality of life and to human wellbeing. Ecosystems services and their continued provision underpin human existence, health and prosperity. Governments, communities and natural resource managers are taking a broader ecosystem approach to decision making for natural resource management issues that can achieve multiple benefits for landowners and society. Biodiversity is central to the production of ecosystem services; it is the direct source of services, such as food and fibre, and underpins others, such as clean water and air, through the role of organisms in energy and material cycles. This paper provides an overview of the concept of ecosystem services and how they are valued. There are both use values and non-use values that comprise the total economic value, including both the intrinsic values of ecosystems and biodiversity and the market values of goods and services. This paper also addresses new opportunities for developing markets for previously undervalued ecosystem services, and gives examples of where an ecosystem approach has lead to the achievement of multiple outcomes.

One of the aims of the CoLUPSIA project is to explore options for establishing payments for ecosystem services (PES) within the two districts where the project is working: Seram and Kapuas Hulu. These guidelines were prepared to support the CoLUPSIA team in completing this assessment and have since been revised to incorporate some findings from the field assessments.

This book highlights the latest advances in the science and practice of using ecosystem services to inform decisions for economic development in the context of the developing countries. The development of the ecosystem services paradigm has enhanced our understanding of natural capital as an indispensable form of capital asset along with produced and human capital. This book addresses what could be the possible pathways to mainstream natural capital assets into development policies and what is currently known about the economic values of ecosystem services. A series of innovative tools to help policy makers and planners account for natural capital and ecosystem services in sectoral and macroeconomic policies have been explored and their application at the national and regional scale has been demonstrated. Several detailed case studies are presented in which the understanding of ecosystem services values has successfully informed decisions, including examples from Chile, South Africa, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, Vietnam and the Aral Sea in Central Asia. These provide the critically important insights, lessons learned and means and mechanisms for policy makers to incentivize protection and discourage degradation of ecosystems and the services they provide. Mainstreaming Natural Capital and Ecosystem Services into Development Policy is designed to help decision makers at all levels, including governments, businesses, multilevel development banks and individuals to integrate ecosystems and their services into their decision making.