Problematizing REDD+ as an experiment in payments for ecosystem services
Highlights
► REDD+ can be conceptualized as the world's largest experiment in payments for ecosystem services. ► REDD+ and PES contribute to shift the logic of conservation from an ethical to a utilitarian ethos. ► They result in procedural and distributive inequities and may crowd-out conservation values in the future. ► An ecological debt fund would be a more ecologically and socially just approach to influence land-use governance.
Introduction
Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation, conserving and enhancing forest carbon stocks, and sustainably managing forests (REDD+) is an international climate policy framework aimed at generating incentives to protect and better manage forest resources, by recognizing and establishing an economic value for the additional carbon stored in trees or not emitted to the atmosphere [1]. REDD+’s procedural rules have evolved over time [2] and its implementation means are country-specific. To be effective, REDD+ will require several coordinated national and regional policy programs, subnational projects, and involve multiple actors, including governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), multilateral agencies, private organizations, communities and individuals. REDD+ activities can thus include enforcing and expanding protected areas, combating illegal logging, changing subsidy and incentive policies, improving land-use planning, developing new forest management regulations, taxes and sanctions, and also very likely providing targeted economic incentives to land owners and rural communities through national and project-based schemes of payments for ecosystem services (PES) [3, 4]. Subsequently, governments should develop legal and technical frameworks for a carbon accounting system that controls for and does not double-count emission reductions from multiple activities, whilst taking into account carbon ownership and liability issues [5, 6]. The diversity of implementation means and participants makes REDD+ a relevant experiment of multi-level environmental governance [7, 8].
REDD+ has so far been catapulted through a range of public funds1 supporting the development of technical capacities and the design and early implementation of developing country policy options, counting with deposits for a total of 1.5 billion US$. Some of this funding will probably have to be sustained over time to consolidate carbon accounting and capacity building in developing countries. Additionally, a long-standing framework to reward governments and private actors for the supply of carbon emission reductions will probably have to rely on carbon markets and/or new supporting funds generated by proceeds from permit auctions or surcharges on trading of emission credits; a levy on Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects; a tax on air traffic, fines imposed on countries that do not comply with the international climate regime; and debt-for-nature swaps [9].
This paper conceptualizes REDD+ as the world's largest PES experiment. PES are generally understood as a voluntary transfer of – most often monetary – incentives from beneficiaries to providers of ecosystem services, as long as incentives are made conditional to actual service provision and participation is voluntary. Some PES are part of well-developed markets for mitigating impacts through offsetting, such as carbon markets and wetland banking [10, 11]. REDD+ aims to transfer economic resources from carbon offset buyers to sellers with payments being conditional to the adoption of sustainable land-use practices and the delivery of emission reductions against national or project-based baselines, expressed in tonnes of avoided or sequestered carbon dioxide emissions. As suggested above, payments are likely to be articulated through transnational or global markets for REDD+ and other types of carbon offsets.
REDD+ thus promotes the commodification of ecosystems’ primary production by isolating carbon storage and sequestration functions from other services provided by forests; quantifying such functions with a standard unit of measurement (tonnes of CO2); monitoring and reporting carbon stocks and fluxes over time and landscapes; and economically valuing the cost of avoided or sequestered forest carbon emissions for the purpose of exchange between buyers and sellers [9]. It upscales the model of project-based forest carbon offsets promoted by voluntary carbon markets and the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism to encompass programmatic policy actions at country level and national-based carbon accounting methods.
What follows draws on critiques of and insights from incentive-based conservation, including PES and REDD+ evidence, to frame REDD+ as a paradigmatic example of market-based conservation, that is the management of nature according to monetary values, and utilitarian principles of supply and demand [12]. This conservation approach is unsurprisingly subject to the ‘particularities of place’ and varying degrees of public and private intervention and re-regulation that characterize the ‘neoliberalization of nature’ [13, 14, 15••, 16, 17, 18••]. It is argued that REDD+ transforms the conservation logic and reconfigures livelihood strategies without significantly altering procedural and distributive justice conditions of the geographies where concrete REDD+ policies and project interventions unfold. In doing so, the paper sheds light on the risks and limitations of ecosystem service-driven conservation and adds to a growing body of evidence that exposes the limitations of “selling nature to save it” [19, 20, 21]. The conclusions summarize the argument and introduce an alternative proposal for funding land-use governance in developing countries.
Section snippets
Itemizing nature fosters a shift in conservation logic
The concept ‘ecosystem services’ has been popularized by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment as the benefits that nature provides to humans and that influence our well being [22]. The concept was already coined in the late 1970s and early 1980s but its utilitarian emphasis has been only recently discussed and criticized [23, 24, 25]. Dividing nature in a collection of ecosystem services is a scientifically-driven process that, taken out of context, may render invisible the inter-connectedness
Pricing ecosystem services risks crowding-out conservation behavior
The underlying attribution of a monetary value to an ecosystem service that characterizes REDD+ and other PES schemes risks undermining or at best underplaying other languages of valuation [12]. Examples of rural communities resisting the pricing and exchange of ecosystem services are rare, potentially due to the fact that only those PES schemes that are somehow supported and become implemented are thoroughly researched. In south-east Mexico, for example, there are documented cases of
Uneven procedural and distributive outcomes
PES schemes are informed by a neoliberal environmentalist rhetoric that makes it possible for ecosystem service buyers to “eat one's conservation cake and have development desert too” [61]. Governments and NGOs often understand PES as instruments that can reconcile conservation and development goals and acknowledge the role of landowners and communities in securing the provision of ecosystem services. When introduced to prospective providers, both national and localized PES schemes have been
Conclusion
This paper has argued that REDD+ can be conceptualized as the largest PES experiment in the world. As such, the framework is congruent with an existing trend towards ‘neoliberalizing nature’ that is characterized by the re-regulation of state and non-state driven forms of conservation through the commodification of new ecosystem goods and services; an increasing number and complexity of actors pursuing conservation; a process of territorialization that demarcates new spaces for controlling
References and recommended reading
Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:
• of special interest
•• of outstanding interest
Acknowledgements
I acknowledge the valuable comments provided by two anonymous reviewers and the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through a ‘Ramón y Cajal’ fellowship (RYC-2010-07183) and of the Biodiversa Framework Project INVALUABLE: Values, Markets, and Policies for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (PRI-PIMBDV-2011-1072).
References (86)
- et al.
Governing and implementing REDD+
Environ Sci Policy
(2011) From RED to REDD+: the evolution of a forest-based mitigation approach for developing countries
Curr Opin Environ Sustain
(2012)Property rights and liability for deforestation under REDD+: implications for ‘permanence’ in policy design
Ecol Econ
(2011)- et al.
Seeing REDD+ as a project of environmental governance
Environ Sci Policy
(2011) - et al.
Reconciling theory and practice: an alternative framework for understanding payments for ecosystem services
Ecol Econ
(2010) - et al.
Payments for ecosystem services as commodity fetishism
Ecol Econ
(2010) - et al.
Market-oriented conservation governance: the particularities of place
Geoforum
(2012) - et al.
The history of ecosystem services in economic theory and practice: from early notions to markets and payment schemes
Ecol Econ
(2010) The environment as a commodity
Environ Values
(2000)Property rights and ecosystem properties
Land Use Policy
(2007)
Economic valuation and the commodification of ecosystem services
Prog Phys Geogr
Trade-offs across space, time, and ecosystem services
Ecol Soc
Designing payments for environmental services in theory and practice: an overview of the issues
Ecol Econ
Participation in payments for ecosystem services: case studies from the Lacandon rainforest, Mexico
Geoforum
Payment for ecosystem services and the challenge of saving nature
Conserv Biol
Cash alone will not slow forest carbon emissions
Nature
Social image concerns and prosocial behavior: field evidence from a nonlinear incentive scheme
J Econ Behav Organ
No pay, no care? A case study exploring motivations for participation in payments for ecosystem services in Uganda
Oryx
The inconvenient truth of carbon offsets
Nature
Between bolivar and bureaucracy: the Mesoamerican biological corridor
Conserv Soc
Indigenous peoples’ land rights and REDD: a case study
RECIEL
The potential perils of forest carbon contracts for developing countries: cases from Africa
J Peasant Stud
REDD: a reckoning of environment and development implications
Trends Ecol Evol
Lessons Learned for REDD+ from PES and Conservation Incentive Programs. Examples from Costa Rica, Mexico, and Ecuador
Rights to land, forests and carbon in REDD+: insights from Mexico, Brazil and Costa Rica
Forests
REDD+ governance
WIREs Climate Change
Ensuring REDD plays its part in any post-2012 agreement: which issues remain to be resolved?
Carbon Manage
Whims of the winds of time? Emerging trends in biodiversity conservation and protected area management
Conserv Soc
Commodifying what nature?
Prog Hum Geogr
Neoliberalising nature: the logics of deregulation and reregulation
Environ Plan A
Neoliberal nature, ecological fixes, and the pitfalls of comparative research
Environ Plan A
Neoliberal conservation: a brief introduction
Conserv Soc
Selling nature to save it? Biodiversity and the rise of green development planning
Environ Plan D: Soc Space
Capitalism and conservation: the production and reproduction of biodiversity conservation
Antipode
NatureTM Inc.: changes and continuities in neoliberal conservation and market-based environmental policy
Dev Change
Ecosystems and HumanWell-being Synthesis
Defining and classifying ecosystem services for decision making
Ecol Econ
Classification of ecosystem services: problems and solutions
Biol Conserv
Ecosystem services: from eye-opening metaphor to complexity blinder
Ecol Econ
Nature: ecosystems without commodifying them
Nature
Cited by (196)
The distributive equity and the incentives to the private sector in reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation-plus
2023, Journal for Nature ConservationThe effect of broadleaf forests in wildfire mitigation in the WUI – A simulation study
2023, International Journal of Disaster Risk ReductionGlobal patterns of collective payments for ecosystem services and their degrees of commodification
2023, Ecological EconomicsCan REDD+ projects deliver livelihood benefits in private tenure arrangements? Experiences from rural Zambia
2023, Forest Policy and EconomicsAn urban PES model for diffused green areas requalification and maintenance in Milan
2022, Environmental Science and Policy