Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations- FAO
Payments for Environmental Services (PES) from Agricultural Landscapes
see also
Paying farmers for environmental services
FAO - THE STATE OF FOOD AND AGRICULTURE 2007
Healthy ecosystems provide a variety of vital goods and services that contribute directly or indirectly to human well-being. However most of them are currently in decline, and making their value clear to those who benefit from them but are not direct land users can encourage investment in their protection and enhancement. click here for more
Payments for Environmental Services (PES)?Payments for Environmental Services are an economic instrument designed to provide incentives to land users, on behalf of service beneficiaries, for agricultural land, coastal, or marine management practices, that are expected to result in continued or improved service provision, so a specific user or society will benefit more broadly. Current PES schemes focus on water, carbon, or biodiversity and respond mainly to public, but increasingly also to private, interest in addressing an environmental problem through positive incentives to land managers. click here for more
How can the poor benefit from PES?Poverty is a major cause of environmental degradation: thus rewarding poor producers to adopt more environmentally friendly systems of production would result in both environmental benefits and poverty reduction. Unfortunately, many aspects that might prevent or limit participation in a PES programme are likely to be correlated with poverty: insecure land tenure, lack of title, small farm holdings, or lack of access to credit. There is the need to understand how PES programmes can be designed to maximize poverty reduction and minimize possible negative effects, whilst not undermining the achievement of the programmes' environmental goals. click here for more
