scholarly journals Three Barriers to Effective Programs with Payment for Ecosystem Services: Behavioral Responses in a Computer-Based Experiment

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (22) ◽  
pp. 12346
Author(s):  
Jacob P. Byl
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Endangered Species ◽  
Financial Incentives ◽  
Behavioral Responses ◽  
Benefit Sharing ◽  
Payment For Ecosystem Services ◽  
Conservation Programs ◽  
Early Exit ◽  
Computer Based

Financial incentives in the form of payment for ecosystem services (PES) can encourage participation in voluntary conservation programs, but real-world experience with PES is limited for services such as the provision of endangered species habitats. A computer-based laboratory experiment with 139 US college students as subjects suggests there are three barriers to effective PES programs: (1) financial rewards can crowd out altruism—low-level PES in the experiment was less effective than the same program without PES; (2) landowners may assuage guilt over destroying habitats by making contributions to ineffective conservation programs—participants often paired destruction of habitat with token contributions to conservation efforts; and (3) landowners may strategically exit conservation agreements in ways that are detrimental to wildlife—a large proportion of participants chose to leave agreements and destroy habitats when the PESs were structured without credible deterrence of an early exit. Fortunately, the results of the experiment also suggest research to overcome these barriers by ensuring that PES financial incentives are scaled and structured to effectively promote conservation. The lessons from this study—though they issue from the particular context of this experiment—provide suggestions about how to structure benefit sharing schemes that could be used to promote conservation in a range of settings.

scholarly journals Research on a Biodiversity Conservation Value Assessment Method Based on Habitat Suitability of Species: A Case Study in Gansu Province, China

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 3007
Author(s):  
Xiaojiong Zhao ◽  
Jian Wang ◽  
Junde Su ◽  
Wei Sun ◽  
Haoxian Meng
Keyword(s):  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Endangered Species ◽  
Biodiversity Conservation ◽  
Gansu Province ◽  
Distribution Area ◽  
Suitable Habitat ◽  
Conservation Value ◽  
Value Assessment ◽  
Rare And Endangered Species ◽  
Rare And Endangered

Quantitative assessment and evaluation of ecological parameters and biodiversity conservation are prime concerns for long-term conservation of rare and endangered species and their associated habitats in any ecological region. In this study, Gansu Province, a biodiversity hotspot, was chosen as the research area. We predicted the distribution patterns of suitable habitats for rare and endangered species. The replacement cost method was adopted to calculate the conservation value of rare and endangered species. The suitable habitat distribution area of rare and endangered wild animals reached 351,607.76 km2 (without overlapping area), while that of plants reached 72,988.12 km2 (without overlapping area). The conservation value of rare and endangered wildlife is US $1670.00 million. The high-value areas are mostly concentrated in the south and north of Gansu Province. The conservation value of rare and endangered wild plants is US $56,920.00 million. The high-value areas are mostly concentrated south of Gansu Province. The conservation value is US $58,590.00 million a year, and its distribution trend is gradually decreasing from northeast to southwest, with the highest in the forest area south of Gansu Province, followed by the Qilian Mountain area in the north. These results are of great significance for future improvement of the evaluation index system of ecosystem services and the development of ecosystem services and management strategies.

Payment for Ecosystem Services policies in Peru: assessing the social and ecological dimensions of water services in the upper Santa River basin 

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosa María Dextre ◽  
María Luisa Eschenhagen ◽  
Mirtha Camacho ◽  
Sally Rangecroft ◽  
Laurence Couldrick ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
River Basin ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Water Services ◽  
Payment For Ecosystem Services ◽  
Metabolic Pattern ◽  
Design And Implementation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Latin American Region

<p>Increasing pressures on ecosystems in the Latin American region as well as the adoption of multilateral conservation commitments have led to the implementation of instruments that are economic in nature but oriented towards the recovery, conservation, and functioning of ecosystems. The increasing adoption of schemes such as payment for ecosystem services (PES) has emerged as multilateral strategies to address water security problems in the mountain regions of Perú. However, their design and implementation can face many barriers when the policy is translated into practice in a local context. Socio-economic processes and hydro-climatic factors are affecting the capacity of the ecosystems of the glaciated Cordillera Blanca (Peruvian Andes) to provide water services, in terms of both, quality and quantity, to the main users of the Santa River basin. This study thus aims to analyze how the hydro-social relations affect, and are affected by, the introduction of water-related PES in the Quillcay sub-basin, one of the most populated sub-basin along the Santa River basin. The water metabolism approach was used to characterize water as a service produced by ecological systems (water as an ecological fund) and co-produced by social systems (water as a social flow). For this purpose, a classification of the different social and ecological uses and meanings of water was used, as well as the role of the different actors involved. </p><p>Based on the combination of primary data, both from an urban citizens survey (Huaraz) and semi-structured interviews with different actors, and from secondary sources, we present evidence that the metabolic pattern of water in the upper Santa basin is impacted not only by the glacial meltwater and rainwater regime but also by political, economic and cultural power relations over water. Thus, the implementation of a PES policy in the upper Santa basin affects and is affected by, ecological and social dimensions of water. In the ecological dimension, glacial retreat makes the design of a water-related PES more complex. In the social dimension, some socio-political processes, such as the lack of experience and the limited technical and financial capacity of public water management institutions to carry out these processes, as well as the lack of political will of regional and local authorities to promote them, are affecting the way these PES schemes are implemented. Along with these institutional bottlenecks, local socio-cultural processes related to a lack of interest in participating and demanding to participate in these decision-making processes could result in the design of a mechanism in which not all stakeholders benefit equally. This raises the need to recognize the multi-dimensional nature of water in the design and implementation of policies, and the importance of identifying processes and barriers which affect the success of these policies.</p>

Data Organization

1977 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce M. Durding ◽  
Curtis A. Becker ◽  
John D. Gould
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Information Retrieval ◽  
Organizational Structures ◽  
Semantic Relations ◽  
Data Organization ◽  
Retrieval Systems ◽  
Information Retrieval Systems ◽  
Computer Based

Three experiments investigated how people organize data. Subjects were given sets of 15-20 words and asked to organize them on paper. Each word set had a pre-defined organization (hierarchy, network, lists, table) based on the semantic relations among the words. Experiment 1 showed that college students have all these organizational structures available for use. They organized most word sets on the basis of the semantic relations inherent in them. Whereas most subjects used “appropriate” organizations (those that most easily preserved the relations), a few subjects organized nearly all word sets into lists. Experiment 2 showed that subjects can efficiently fit the word sets into “skeletons” that were explicitly designed to maintain all the semantic relations among the words. Experiment 3 showed that subjects have difficulty in preserving the relations among the words when they were required to organize them into inappropriate structures. These results are evaluated relative to the use of computer-based information retrieval systems.

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