Payment for Environmental Services - Answer to Dwindling Ecosystem
Nelson Dacawe
Water users would prefer their water to be free of charge, but the watershed that provide clean water to users have to support additional and sometimes conflicting functions, such as agriculture, and forestry activities.
Farms and forests supply a wide variety of valuable ecosystem services including clean water, carbon sequestration, preservation and creation of beautiful landscape, preservation of biodiversity, and represent a reservoir of soil fertility, purify the air, influence the climate, and frequently have religious significance.
While these environmental services have been largely free of charge, competing demands and growing scarcity now required greater mediation to ensure protection alongside equitable benefit sharing.
Indigenous peoples who are manager of this intangible resources rarely, if ever, receive a financial reward for these services. As a result they are too quick to clear the forest for its valuable products converting the land into a commercial vegetable farm and do other activities that disrupt ecosystem benefits.
The concept of Payment for Environmental Services (PES) has received substantial interest in the pass years as a way of creating incentives to those who properly manage natural resources thus, creating livelihood for the rural poor while providing sustainable financing for the ecosystem.
This PES approach is probably the most promising innovation in conservation since Rio 1992. This represents a new approach that focuses directly on creating a conditional benefit transfer between providers and beneficiaries of environmental services.
The entry point of PES in ecosystem conservation is credited to the debate on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) either within or outside the Kyoto framework.
REDD is an effort to create a financial value for the carbon stored in forests, offering incentives for developing countries to reduce emissions from forested lands and invest in low-carbon activity to sustainable development. Moreover, REDD goes beyond deforestation and forest degradation, and includes the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks.
The Organization of American State (OAS) has mobilized new financing for developing countries to help address poverty and environmental degradation. According to OAS data, compliance to regulatory carbon markets have grown from US$11 billion in 2005 to US$24 billion in 2006 and to more than US$30 billion in 2009.
For many developing countries, the loss of ecosystem services will be a barrier to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to reduce hunger, disease and poverty. Although today’s technology and knowledge can contribute to minimizing the human impact on ecosystems, their potential is unlikely to be benefited until ecosystem services cease to be perceived as free and limitless and given importance.
The Philippine watershed consists of 70% of the total area, however the rapid rate of deforestation both legal and illegal paved way for forest land conversion into agricultural lands and settlements. The situation was aggravated by high population growth, tolerated and even encouraged. It was estimated by the World Agroforestry Center that more than 30 million people are already residing in the now fragile upland watersheds.
The Cordillera as “Watershed Cradle of the North” has conducted watershed and PES Conferences in an attempt to increase awareness on the deteriorating conditions of the Cordillera watersheds and major river systems, and to undertake comprehensive watershed program co-opting the support of Regions 1 and 2.
Recently the Second Cordillera Highland Agricultural Resource Management (CHARM2) Project has adapted the PES concept during the recently conducted Sagada Watershed Inter-agency Planning-Workshop to include policy, legal, cultural and institutional framework.
The CHARM2 Project on Community Watershed Conservation, Forest Management and Agroforestry is aligning its ecosystems project with the recognition of Ancestral Domain Title as a basis for future compensation of the indigenous peoples for the environmental services they provide.
The concept of PES recognizes the fact that people who are abusing our environment, and thus decreasing the benefits others received, are sometimes merely trying to make a living. If environment activities are to be lessened, compensation should be offered to assist the indigenous peoples make their activities more sustainable thereby mitigating the effect of climate change. – 30 –