Information needs

The ability to demonstrate threats to existing services and the effectiveness of upstream land use and management practices is key to building stakeholders’ confidence and maintaining their willingness to pay for watershed services.

Given the complexity and natural variability of watershed processes, however, it is difficult - if not impossible - unequivocally to link all causes and effects. Such linking requires adjustment over time, as lessons are learned from monitoring. Making inherent uncertainties explicit is difficult task, but is critical to managing buyers’ expectations and maintaining their cooperation in the long term. Uncertainty has a cost, but it is a critical consideration when the goal is to identify and negotiate an equitable distribution of costs and benefits.

A review of case studies indicates that the scientific data needed to support the evaluation of trade-offs are often lacking, and most decisions are based on conventional wisdom, secondary sources of information and selective reference to literature on forest hydrology. Payments are based on the opportunity costs of returning cleared land to forest cover, with no attempt to model relationships between land use and hydrology, nor to estimate the marginal value of water in specific consumption and production activities.

Most payment for watershed services initiatives have focused on links between upper watershed land use and downstream urban water supply, and sedimentation of hydropower dams and irrigation canals. It has generally been found difficult to demonstrate the economic significance of impacts at this scale, however.

Insufficient attention has also been given to local-level impacts within micro-watersheds, where land and water relationships can be better understood and stakeholders can be more directly engaged in the process.

last updated: Thursday, January 11, 2007