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“Payments for ecosystem services”, also called payments for environmental services (or PES for short) is the name for a variety of arrangements through which the beneficiary of ecosystem services pay back the providers of those services.
The ecosystem services in question can be:
*watershed protection,
*forests conservation,
*biodiversity conservation,
*carbon sequestration,
*landscape beauty and wildlife husbandry in support of tourism and eco-tourism, and more.
Ecosystem services may be present at any scale, from local to national to international (international ecosystem services are often called “global commons”) and all these scales may allow a PES approach.
Payment schemes may be a market arrangement between willing buyers and willing sellers, such as tourist companies paying African communities for their protection of local wildlife.
It can also be a scheme intermediated by a large private or public entity, for example, a portion of household water bills in New York is used by the water company to buy watershed protection services from farmers in the vicinity of the water company intake.
Or the scheme can be government-driven, where public revenues are used to pay the providers of ecosystem services like in Costa Rica where the Government uses a fraction of the tax on energy to buy forest conservation services from farmers.
Whatever the payment scheme the golden rule for a functioning PES scheme should be that those who pay are aware that they are paying to secure the provision of a valuable ecosystem service, and that those who are paid engage in measurable activities to provide the ecosystem services in question.
Source
The links at the end of this article seem to be broken so a good point to start with the PES initiative is here at the Poverty & Environment: Breaking the linkages between rural poverty and environmental degradation.
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