L15 Payments for ecosystem services Flashcards
How many hectares of forest was converted between 1980and 2012?
154 million
What is down listing?
removal of species from the Federal Lists of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants, as a result of successful recovery efforts
Why is conservation difficult in lower income countries?
Is very expensive to retain and conserve habitats for a species,, needs >10x increase in budget
What is PES?
Payments for ecosystem services - incentives offered to farmers or landowners in exchange for managing their land to provide some sort of ecological service
What is an ecosystem service?
The provision of a natural resource or process that is valued by humankind
What four categories does the millennium ecosystem assessment define?
Supporting services
Provisioning services
Regulating services
Cultural services
What are supporting services?
services that are necessary for the production if all other ecosystem services, such as soil formation, photosynthesis, nutrient recycling and seed dispersal
What are provisioning services?
Provide products that are obtained from the ecosystem, such as water, food, timber and fibre
What are regulating services?
Benefits that are obtained from the regulation of ecosystem processes, such as climax, flood and disease regulation, and water purification
What are cultural services?
Non material benefits, such as aesthetics, recreation and mental wellbeing
How did Constanza value ecosystem services and why?
In monetary terms, aimed at foresting an understanding of the economic benefits of conservation
What are the three stages to valuation?
Economic farming
Monetisation
Commodification
What are the terms used in ecosystem framing?
Ecosystems are capital, ecosystem functions are viewed as services
What is monetisation?
Capital or services given exchange values
What is commodification?
Transformation of a service into commodities or objects of trade. Inclusion of non-marketed services into pricing systems and markets
Creation of institutional structures for sale and exchange
What are the dangers of commodification?
Humans prioritised by Arthropocentric views
Material elements of nature traded since the birth of markets
Controversy over where to draw the line over what should and shouldn’t be commodified
What does anthropocentric mean?
regarding humankind as the central or most important element of existence
Why is it essential to find a way that PES can fund the protection of tropical forest and biodiversity?
Conservation loss happening at a massive scale, and need a big solution that can raise huge amounts of money to protect remote forests
What is the trend seen in energy use across the globe?
An inbalance across the countries
What does REDD + stand for?
Reducing Emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, , the plus is added to include the roles of biodiversity conservation, sustainable forestry and enhancements of forest carbon stocks
How does REDD+ work?
mechanism is to make forests more valuable standing than they would be cut down by creating a financial value for the carbon stored in the trees. Once this carbon is standardized and quantified, REDD+ will allow polluters to purchase cheap carbon offsets (or “pollution licenses”) from countries in the South instead of reducing their own greenhouse gas emissions at source
What are the benefits of carbon payments?
Beneficial when high carbon stores correlate with high biodiversity
What is the global overlay of carbon and biodiversity?
Overlap in distribution layers for biodiversity and the layer of carbon, see a strong correlation
What areas show high species biodiversity but low carbon?
Andes, Himalayas, Atlantic forest