Organisation des Nations Unies pour l’alimentation et l’agriculture- FAO
Paiements des services environnementaux (PSE) dans les paysages agricoles
Paiements des services environnementaux (PSE)
PSE : un outil de la trousse
Payments for Environmental Services (PES) are one of the tools in the incentive-mechanism box, seeking to "get the incentives right" by supporting and motivating the production of positive externalities in the long run.
Although a variety of terms to describe the PES concept can be found in the literature, in our context Payments for Environmental Services refer to:
i) voluntary transactions where
ii) a service provider is paid by or on behalf of service beneficiaries,
iii) for agricultural land, forestry, coastal or marine management practices,
iv) that are expected to result in continued or improved service provision beyond what would have been provided without the payment.
Most PES schemes have a common basic structural design, in which service beneficiaries (e.g. consumers) pay (through financing and payment mechanisms, cash or in kind) land users for providing environmental services (figure 1.2).
Figure 1.2 - Operation of PES schemes: a simplified representation
There are different types of Payments for Environmental Services schemes.
Direct payment schemes are the most common type of PES programmes. In these cases, the government pays landowners, on behalf of civil society, to adopt improved land management options and thus address a particular environmental problem.
For example, in the United States, the Conservation Reserve Programme pays farmers for their protection of endangered wildlife habitat, open space and/or wetlands. Similarly, in China the government is investing US$ 4.3 million a year, to restore erosion-prone sloping land within the upper watersheds of the Yangtze Yellow rivers, to reduce the risk of flooding.
Normally these schemes are financed entirely by the government, on behalf of society, but they may also include contributions from the private sector. For example, in the case of the Costa Rican National PES programme, private sector firms have also contributed with funds to the programme's budget, made up primarily of a percentage of the annual fuel tax revenues. These companies are mainly hydropower companies, interested in managing the risk of increased sediment load in the rivers.
There are also product-based PES schemes , where consumers pay a "green premium" in addition to the market price of a product or service, in order to ensure an environmentally friendly production process, which is verified through independent certification. When consumers choose to pay this price-premium they are also choosing, in a sense, to pay for the protection of environmental services. Ecolabelling certification programmes have been developed for a variety of products including shade-grown coffee, organic farming, certified timber - for more on this see the section Buying Environmental Services
PES schemes often appear in combination with other incentive mechanisms. For example, they always require a clarification of the property rights of the environmental service being produced in order to identify the provider who should receive compensation for their provision. Similarly, in the context of cap and trade programmes , Payment for Environmental Services can be used to meet government or a regulatory body limits ("caps") on the amount of emissions or pollution permitted in a given area. In order to reach emission or pollution reduction targets firms or individuals can buy offsets in form of carbon credits for example from farmers or forest companies that are planting trees which sequester carbon, or protecting a natural forest.
This is the case for the Kyoto-regulated greenhouse gas emissions and the biodiversity mandated offsets in the USA. Farmers and other land managers (e.g. forest companies) interested in supplying credits for these programmes may do so by implementing land management options that can increase carbon sequestration and/or conserve biodiversity, respectively - see more on PES applications.
