Download or read book Investigating the Role and Scale of Transactions Costs of Incentive based Programs for Provision of Environmental Services in Developing Countries written by Daniel Vicente Ortega Pacheco and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: The use of incentives for the provision of environmental services occupies a critically important place in the international development agenda. The use of local approaches for watershed services provision and international efforts for global provision of climate change land-based mitigation services are among promising management options. These two options have the potential to significantly reduce the overall costs of meeting environmental targets through market-based institutional arrangements. Despite widespread agreement that transaction costs are important, existing research has not yet considered the scale and role of transaction costs in determining: 1) the rate of adoption of incentive-based schemes for the provision of watershed services in the developing world, and 2) the supply of mitigation services associated with avoided emissions from deforestation, particularly in a developing country context. To address the former, the first chapter of this dissertation identifies patterns of adoption and the exogenous and endogenous factors that help to explain the number of incentive-based programs adopted during the last decade. Using an econometric model, it suggests that the degree of adoption can be interpreted as diffusion of interdependent induced institutional innovations. The second chapter presents a conceptual framework for transaction costs and reports results of field data collection and empirical estimates of the scale of transaction costs of mitigation through land-based activities in Ecuador taking place under alternative incentive-based institutional arrangements. The third chapter of this dissertation develops an econometric model to estimate the elasticity of land supply in Ecuador and evaluates the effect that transaction costs have on incentive-based mitigation activities. Knowledge generated from this research aims at enriching the scholarly debate on policy diffusion and climate change policy and provides critical insights for policymakers interested in incentive-based institutional arrangements for the provision of environmental services.
Download or read book Lessons from Payments for Ecosystem Services for REDD Benefit Sharing Mechanisms written by Lasse Loft and published by CIFOR. This book was released on 2014-04-02 with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where benefits and costs accrue at different scales, financial intermediaries are needed to facilitate relations between global-scale buyers and local-scale providers of carbon sequestration and storage. These intermediaries can help to collect and distribute payments and to promote the scheme to potential beneficiaries. The benefits distributed should compensate for the transaction, opportunity and implementation costs incurred by stakeholders for providing ecosystem services. Therefore, calculating the costs and understanding who incurs them are essential for benefit sharing. Targeting benefits according to a set of criteria that match the objectives of the specific mechanism increases the mechanism’s efficiency. As the level of performance-based payments may not be able to compete with the opportunity costs of highly profitable land uses, performance-related benefit-sharing mechanisms should be focused on areas with moderate opportunity costs. Benefits should be divided into upfront payments to cover startup costs and to give an initial incentive for participation, and payments upon delivery of ecosystem services to ensure adherence to conditionality.
Download or read book Issues to be Addressed by the Program for Measuring Incremental Costs for the Environment written by Kenneth King and published by Washington, D.C. : World Bank. This book was released on 1993 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global Environment Facility Working Paper 8. Describes the five key research areas to be addressed by the Program for Measuring Incremental Costs for the Environment (PRINCE). This paper outlines incremental cost concepts, operational interpretations, national climate change studies, country studies on ozone protection, and transaction costs. It also develops a broad interpretation of "incremental cost" that can be used across the range of issues covered by the Global Environment Facility (GEF). Those issues include global warming, pollution of international waters, destruction of biodiversity, and ozone depletion. This is one of five GEF Working Papers to explore the PRINCE program and is co-published with the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.
Download or read book Payment for Environmental Services in Agricultural Landscapes written by Leslie Lipper and published by Springer-Verlag New York Incorporated. This book was released on 2009 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, development policy has responded to an increasing concern about natural resource degradation by setting up innovative payment for environmental services (PES) programs in developing countries. PES programs use market and institutional incentives in order to meet both environmental and poverty alleviation objectives. However, their optimal design, implications for the rural poor, and how these initiatives integrate into international treaties on global warming and biodiversity loss are still being discussed. This book addresses these issues by examining analytical tools, providing policy insights and stimulating debate on linkages between poverty alleviation and environmental protection. In particular, it turns attention towards the role of environmental services in agricultural landscapes as they provide a living for many poor in developing countries.--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Taking Stock written by Sven Wunder and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Payment for Environmental Services in Agricultural Landscapes written by Leslie Lipper and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, development policy has responded to an increasing concern about natural resource degradation by setting up innovative payment for environmental services (PES) programs in developing countries. PES programs use market and institutional incentives in order to meet both environmental and poverty alleviation objectives. However, their optimal design, implications for the rural poor, and how these initiatives integrate into international treaties on global warming and biodiversity loss are still being discussed. This book addresses these issues by examining analytical tools, providing policy insights and stimulating debate on linkages between poverty alleviation and environmental protection. In particular, it turns attention towards the role of environmental services in agricultural landscapes as they provide a living for many poor in developing countries.--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Payments for Ecosystem Services PES written by Emily Fripp and published by CIFOR. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the aims of the CoLUPSIA project is to explore options for establishing payments for ecosystem services (PES) within the two districts where the project is working: Seram and Kapuas Hulu. These guidelines were prepared to support the CoLUPSIA team in completing this assessment and have since been revised to incorporate some findings from the field assessments.
Download or read book Payments for Environmental Services written by Sven Wunder and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Targeting Economic Incentives for Environmental Protection written by Albert L. Nichols and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1984 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes a major and original contribution to the "incentives vs. standards" debate by showing how different targets (the points at which incentives are applied) affect the ability of regulation to provide environmental protection at lowest possible cost.
Download or read book Payments for Environmental Services written by Meine van Noordwijk and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Payments for environmental services (PES), the non-provisioning part of ecosystem services, target alignment of microeconomic incentives for land users with meso- and macroeconomic societal costs and benefits of their choices across stakeholders and scales. They can interfere with or complement social norms and rights-based approaches at generic (land-use planning) and individual (tenure, use rights) levels; they interact with macroeconomic policies influencing the drivers to which individual agents respond. In many developing country contexts, community scale factors strongly influence land users' decisions, whereas unclear land rights complicate the use of market-based instruments. PES concepts need to adapt. Multiple paradigms have emerged within the broad PES domain. Evidence suggests that forms of “coinvestment in stewardship” (CIS) alongside rights are the preferred entry point. Commodification of environmental services (ES) and ES markets might evolve later on, but require strong government regulation to set and enforce rules of the game. We frame hypotheses for wider testing and “no-regrets” recommendations for practitioners.
Download or read book All that Glitters written by Ina T. Porras and published by IIED. This book was released on 2008 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Financing Energy Efficiency written by Robert P. Taylor and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2008-02-08 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While energy efficiency projects could partly meet new energy demand more cheaply than new supplies, weak economic institutions in developing and transitional economies impede developing and financing energy efficiency retrofits. This book analyzes these difficulties, suggests a 3-part model for projectizing and financing energy efficiency retrofits, and presents thirteen case studies to illustrate the issues and principles involved.
Download or read book Incentive Contracts for Environmental Services and Their Potential in REDD written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Implementation arrangements for Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation can be seen as contracts that could address some of the inherent problems with forest carbon credits that often lead to high transaction costs -- measuring, monitoring, and verification. Self-enforcing contracts, where it is in the best interest of the environmental service providers to comply with the contracts, may be one way to reduce these costs if providers have incentives to uphold their end of the contract. While the literature on Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation is extensive, there is little information available to guide policy makers or investors on what form such contracts should take. After providing an overview of the current status of Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation and its role as a tool for reducing carbon emissions on an international scale, the paper describes key issues regarding implementation and reviews the literature on contracts from the related area of Payments for Ecosystem Services programs, which face similar challenges. The remainder of the paper reviews various contractual mechanisms from agricultural and forestry related projects that have been proposed or are being used in practice and discusses the various implications associated with their design and implementation"--Abstract.
Download or read book From Incentives to Impact written by Katherine Marie Brownson and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs have come into widespread use in recent decades. PES incentivize land managers to account for the value of ecosystem services (ES) that provide public benefits in their private decision-making. As programs can provide cash or in-kind incentives to rural land managers, they are also promoted for their potential to contribute to rural development, especially where economic opportunities may be otherwise limited. PES programs can vary significantly in the ES they target, the incentives they provide, the activities they incentivize, as well as in their scale, governance and participating actors. In this dissertation, I use a social-ecological systems framework to evaluate how the governance of PES influences both social and environmental outcomes to determine if trade-offs are occurring between multiple outcome types. I used a mixed-methods approach to evaluate PES impacts across scales, ranging from reviews of PES around the world to the impacts of particular PES interventions in rural Costa Rica. Specifically, I employed literature reviews, focus groups and semi-structured interviews to generate qualitative data and ecosystem services modeling, surveys and avian community composition analysis to generate quantitative data. My analyses revealed a range of positive social and environmental impacts of PES. Globally, I found that community engagement in local PES programs are improving social capital, community assets and program legitimacy. In rural Costa Rica, I found that local, community-based PES are improving the provisioning of multiple ES that are also directly benefiting local communities. Although the national PES program in Costa Rica is not generating significant ES benefits, cash payments are benefiting program participants and these cash payments may be enabling additional conservation activities on lands not under contract. Therefore, although PES may not be consistently generating "win-wins" for people and the environment, trade-offs are not inevitable. Additional monitoring and evaluation of a range of potential program impacts may help expand the evidence base regarding the conditions under which synergies can be maximized between social and environmental outcomes.
Download or read book Global Trends 2040 written by National Intelligence Council and published by Cosimo Reports. This book was released on 2021-03 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.
Download or read book Targeting of Transfers in Developing Countries written by David Coady and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2004 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a database of more than one hundred anti-poverty interventions in 47 countries, 'Targeting of Transfers in Developing Countries' provides a general review of experiences with methods used to target interventions in transition and developing countries. Written for policymakers and program managers in developing countries, in donor agencies, and in NGOs who have responsibility for designing interventions that reach the poor, it conveys what targeting options are available, what results can be expected as well as information that will assist in choosing among them and in their implementation. Key messages are: - While targeting 'works' - the median program transfers 25 percent more to the poor than would a universal allocation - targeting performance around the world is highly variable. - Means testing, geographic targeting, and self-selection based on a work requirement are the most robustly progressive methods. Proxy means testing, community-based selection of individuals and demographic targeting to children show good results on average, but with considerable variation. - Demographic targeting to the elderly, community bidding, and self-selection based on consumption show limited potential for good targeting. - There is no single preferred method for all types of programs or all country contexts. Successful targeting depends critically on how a method is implemented. The CD-ROM includes the database of interventions, an annotated bibliography (PDF) and Spanish and Russian translations of the book (PDFs).
Download or read book Fresh Tracks in the Forest Assessing Incipient Payments for Environmental Services Initiatives in Bolivia written by Nina Robertson and published by CIFOR. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Payments for Environmental Services (PES) are being considered worldwide with great interest and expectation. Proposals to create agreements in which beneficiaries of environmental services pay landowners directly for the provision or protection of these services are innovative and promising. But what real PES experiences are actually out there? This work assesses a range of PES or PES-type experiences in one country, Bolivia, in the fields of carbon sequestration, protection of watershed services, biodiversity and aesthetic landscape values. The report concludes that while none of the generally young initiatives adhere fully to the principle of PES as developed in the theoretical literature, many experiment with some of the relevant PES mechanisms. Protection of watersheds and landscape values are the most common types, though the implementing intermediaries often have underlying biodiversity-protection goals. Main obstacles to PES implementation include ideological resistance against the PES concept, the difficulty of building trust between buyers and sellers, and limited willingness to pay on behalf of service users. During their relatively short lifetime, basically all initiatives had been successful in making service sellers (PES recipients) better off in economic terms, while the effectiveness in achieving environmental objectives and securing positive social impacts so far remained more variable. In some cases, redesigning these initiatives to bring them closer to the full PES principles could also enable them to more effectively achieve positive environmental and livelihood outcomes.
