Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations- FAO
Payments for Environmental Services (PES) from Agricultural Landscapes
Contingency and accountability
Compliance on the supply side: payment rules
Participating land managers commit to the PES programme agreement through periodically renewed contracts that specify what land management options are allowed and the consequences of non-compliance(26). While in more complex schemes, compliance is monitored using geo-referenced satellite imagery, in smaller schemes this may be done through random field inspections. Sanctions are generally limited to withholding payments.
Due to the difficulties mentioned in the monitoring section, so far few payments are differentiated according to the level of the environmental services service provided. In the case of water for example, it would be difficult to attribute specific improvements in water quality to individual land - water circulates within the watershed and effects can come from far upstream. For this reason, apart from carbon sequestration, most payments are based on a flat fee (or with a few variations) based on the compliance with the land management options implemented (for more on these variations see the section on Payment Level.
Payments should be continuous (to ensure continuous compliance it is easier to use periodical payments that can be discontinued if the provider does not comply with the rules) and open-ended. One-off payments, such as land titles or investments in community infrastructure can have very positive livelihood effects but are harder to use as a guaranty for compliance, as they cannot be taken back. In these cases, additional measures must be taken to ensure that an ongoing incentive for compliance remains (for example offering temporary tenure periodically renewed or adding restrictions to the use of communal structures).
In some cases a larger payment is given in the beginning to help participants adopt the necessary land management changes, and smaller amounts follow during the following years to ensure maintenance. Payment type and timing should also be flexible to adapt to changing needs and circumstances of the participants. For example, in the Los Negros scheme in Bolivia, payment for forest conservation changed from beehives to barbed wire, following the participant’s priority in strengthening their claim over the land, instead of the added income from honey production(27)
(26)For contracts see Getting Started - Step 3- Selecting a contract type and PASOLAC manual with examples of documents for the several steps (only in Spanish) - Elementos metodológicos para la implementación de pagos por servicios ambientales hídricos a nivel municipal en Centroamérica
(27)for more on this see Bees and Barbed Wire for Water on the Bolivian Frontier, by Nigel Asquith and available
