Payments for Ecosystem Services Flashcards
1980-2012: ≈154 Mha of forest converted
x77 area size of Wales
Biodiversity loss, habitat loss, ecological pressures
Cost of downlisting bird species 850 000 dollars per year
Total cost in low & lower-middle income countries to conserve species
$379 - 614 million annually. Can’t afford this, would need a x10 increase in budget
Can Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) fund protection of tropical forest and biodiversity?
Given scale of conservation losses, we need a big solution that can raise huge amounts of money to protect remote forests…
Protection competes with timber and oil palm industries
Net Present Value (NPV) of forest
Profits from timber extraction
Focus on Sabah, NE Borneo
Logging records from 300,000 ha of forest
Records include tree species and sizes
Profits from conversion to oil palm
What carbon price ($tCO2) must be paid under REDD+ to meet our NPV?
Any shortfall must be met from other sources (e.g. conservation NGOs)
What is an ecosystem service?
Ecosystem service is “the provision of a natural resource or process that is valued by humankind” (Edwards et al. 2014 Trends Ecol Evol)
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2003) defines four broad categories: Supporting services Provisioning services Regulating services Cultural services
Supporting services
Necessary for production of all other ecosystem services
Soil formation, photosynthesis, nutrient recycling = difficult to measure
Seed dispersal & pollination = easier to measure
Provisioning services
Products obtained from ecosystems
Food, water, timber, and fibre
Regulating services
Benefits obtained from the regulation of ecosystem processes
Climate, flood, disease regulation, and water purification
Cultural services
Non-material benefits
Aesthetic, recreational (e.g., angling & ecotourism), mental well-being
Valuing ecosystem services
Ecosystem services can be valued in monetary terms (Costanza et al. 1997 Nature)
Costanza et al. aimed to foster an understanding of the economic benefits of conservation
Their study has:
spurned an entire field
it is one of (if not the) most highly cited scientific paper (>5,000 times)
Three stages to valuation of ecosystem services
1) Economic framing
- ecosystems viewed as ‘capital’, ecosystem functions viewed as ‘services’
2) Monetization
- capital or services given exchange ($$) values
3) Commodification
- Inclusion of non-marketed services into pricing systems and markets
- Creation of institutional structures for sale and exchange (Gómez-Baggethun 2011 Prog Phys Geogr)
Value of tropical forest services
Strong spatial congruence with centres of population
Most ecosystem services schemes will not protect remote forests
Dangers of commodification?
Anthropocentric perspective that prioritises instrumental values to humans
Diminish intrinsic values = a key justification for conservation?
Imply substitutability: e.g., insectivorous birds can be replaced by pesticides
Value services close to people (far from wildlife)
“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: “What good is it?” (Leopold 1966, p. 190)
Controversy is over where to draw the line in what should (& shouldn’t) be commodified
REDD+
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation
The ‘+’ was added to include roles of:
Biodiversity conservation
Sustainable forestry
Enhancements of forest carbon stocks
North-South flow of capital
UNFCCC predicts REDD+ payments could reach $30 billion per year
The REDD+ market
Carbon sold must be ‘Additional’:
Reduce background rate of carbon emission
Enhance rate of carbon sequestration
Global carbon market
Most purchasers want to pay cheapest price possible
Carbon-Biodiversity co-benefits?
Win-win when high carbon stores correlate with high biodiversity
Carbon payments thus protect biodiversity
But is this always the case?
Some areas have high carbon, low biodiversity?
Or low carbon, high biodiversity?
Overlaying carbon and biodiversity
Strong correlations with carbon: But plenty of noise
Andes, Himalaya, Atlantic forest = lots species, but low carbon
Simplistic to look at areas with high carbon?
Introducing the cost of a tCO2
Some areas might have high carbon, but prohibitively high costs?
Others lower carbon, but be very cheap?
Introduce economic costs of protecting carbon within biodiverse places
Market will pay lowest $t-1 CO2 possible
Need to account for lost potential revenue
i.e. profit you could have earned from logging and/or farming (opportunity cost)
Calculating $t-1 CO2 in Borneo
How much would it cost to prevent
degradation (via logging)?
deforestation (for agriculture)?
Borneo has two very different forest types: dryland and peatswamp
Can REDD+ save dryland forests?
Carbon price for protection is very high
Dryland forests in Sundaland are unlikely to be protected
Can REDD+ save peatland forests?
Protection also competes with oil palm (but very low timber value in peatswamp)
Norway-Indonesia REDD+ pact
Up to $1 billion for REDD+
Moratorium areas are indistinct from non-moratorium and recently cleared areas
i.e., protection is additional
Deep peats store a lot of carbon:
Drylands release 389 tCO2 per ha
Peatlands release 2249 tCO2 per ha
Need low carbon price of $1.6 - $4.7 tCO2 to protect 1 ha of peatland
But peatlands are not very biodiverse
Can REDD+ enhance regrowth?
Is carbon enhancement via natural regeneration on abandoned farmland viable under REDD+?
Three interrelated questions:
How rapidly does carbon return in secondary forests?
Are there biodiversity co-benefits?
What is the cost $t-1 CO2?
Expanding forest protection
Half of carbon stock recovered in 30 yrs
Much recovery of primary forest biodiversity
Includes IUCN Red-listed + endemic spp.
Big carbon-biodiversity co-benefits of forest restoration on abandoned farmland in Tropical Andes
Estimating carbon cost
Opportunity cost of taking cattle pasture out of production
Plus cost of managing and implementing a carbon project
30-year time horizon
Calculate price for long-term certified emissions reduction (lCER) scheme
Cheap farm abandonment?
REDD+ breakeven point at $2.00/tCO2
Competitive versus avoided deforestation:
E. Africa=$6.50/tCO2; Amazon=$10/tCO2; SE Asia=$18-46/tCO2
Can buy out low-profit farmland cheaply
Big carbon-biodiversity co-benefits
REDD+ & co-benefits
Carbon market demands low prices
Paid just $7.8 tCO2 in 2013
REDD+ cheaply protects carbon with biodiversity co-benefits in some areas
E.g., Tropical Andes, Amazon
Elsewhere either:
Will not meet market price
Will protect areas without big co-benefits
Three key REDD+ challenges
(1) Neo-colonialist or pro-poor?Inequitable forest management operated by national governments not local people
People alienated from resources they depend upon
2010 Cancun agreements established safeguards. Will they work?
(2) Leakage
Protection in one location, simply displaces deforestation elsewhere?
Leakage means could pay for no benefit
Fear of leakage = major block to international approval of REDD+
(3) Agricultural intensification
DRC wants to intensify food production to save most forest at $11.8 t-1 CO2
Intensification results in better transport networks, which raise possible profits
$46 t-1 CO2 to meet DRC’s forest protection plan
Summary
Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes monetize and commodify nature
Supporting, Provisioning, Regulating & Cultural
PES offers big funds to protect nature
REDD+ will protect tropical forest carbon, often in hyper-biodiverse places
Could become a multi-billion $$ industry
Although the threats are great, PES, sensible planning & sustainability drives make the future positive for tropical forests
