I’m involved in a project on developing a PES scheme based on water resources for a high-andean Paramo region at the moment, and am well aware of a complete scarcity of biophysical and socio-economic information in general. A very welcome contribution to the scientific literature has just come out which looks at the hydrological impacts of pine plantations in Paramo regions compared with natural and cultivated land-uses. Wouter Buytaert and colleagues monitored streamflow in four different “experimental” catchments with similar climatic conditions but differing land-use mosaics. They found that the afforested catchment predominantly covered by Pinus patula had a water yield substantially lower than the other catchments (175 mm/yr compared with 506 mm/yr in the neighbouring natural catchment). Quite a marked reduction. Perhaps just as surprising is that the cultivated catchment has a water yield in between the other two natural catchments (at 646 mm/yr), indicating little difference in total discharge (incidentally something we are also finding through modeling). However, flow regulation is affected with some reduction in base-flows from the cultivated catchment, and indeed much more drastic minimum flows in the afforested catchment. Good to put numbers to the hydrological impacts of these land-uses in Paramo ecosystems, and an important contribution to the discussion on whether trees are good for water. Those interested in more info on Paramo hydrology can find an excellent review paper here.
Archive for October, 2007
Our friend Luigi Guarino form the Agrobiodiversity Weblog just sent me a link to a Cambodian Atlas. Included is lots of information on a number of ecosystem services, and even includes poverty data at what looks to be the municipality level (or whatever the administration unit is called in Cambodia!). Useful resource for those of you interested in Cambodia. Thanks Luigi.
I probably commit the error of commonly thinking that more value in an ecosystem service is a good thing, but this is not always the case. Resilience Science have blogged about an article showing how an increase in the eocsystem service for recreation drives land prices up in the US, leading to a loss of land for other ecosystem services such as pulp and timber. Plenty of analogies out there in the tropics in the context of basic ecosystem services and conflicts between rich and poor.
The management of ecosystem services, and any research on their role in poverty alleviation, always requires data. We’re fortunate that the array of satellites up in the skies, and the information revolution that it accompanies is capturing vast amounts of data every second. The challenge is converting that data into something useful, and accessible. Mark Mulligan from King’s College London has put a whole range of environmental datasets online through Google Earth interfaces at his geodata portal. For the non-GIS experts, you can visualise the data in Google Earth, and for the GIS-geeks out there you can find links to download most of the data. Some of the more interesting datasets on ecosystem services include results from his FIESTA model on water resources, land-use cover and change datasets such as those derived from MODIS-VCF, and a number of climate related datasets on tropical cloud cover and rainfall. Check it out!
This may not be a great surprise to many of us, but the BBC front page had a headline that we are failing the sustainability audit. This is the conclusion of the Global Environmental Outlook (GEO) 4th Report, hot off the press. This 572-page document written by hundreds of people no doubt contains plenty of relevant information for this blog. Indeed it seems that it goes further than any of the previous GEO reports in looking at the two-way interaction between societal health and environmental health. While I try and digest over the coming few days, all I can do is direct you to the full report!
Everyone is going PES crazy these days, myself included, but Esteve Corbera and colleagues took a step back from creating new PES schemes to analyse the success of some schemes already in place. They chose four case studies in meso-America, and through stakeholder interviews and critical analysis tried to get to grips with the factors that promote success or generate failure in the scheme. Their findings were fascinating. Looking at the two water-related PES schemes, the numbers alone should ring alarm bells.
In their Las Escobas case study in Guatemala, a PES scheme was established between the local hydroelectric company and a local NGO managing a protected area. The PES is designed to support protection or forest areas, promote sustainable agricultural practices and agroforestry systems, and generate low-impact eco-tourism activities. The PES pays US$17.86/Ha/year, and local water-users contribute US$0.20/month to the fund. The fund covers just 6% of the total expenditure of the NGO, and 40% of the cost of protecting and managing the reserve. Local land-owners are frustrated by the PES, and many stakeholders expressed frustration over the lack of involvement in the negotiation and implementation of the PES.
In the San Pedro del Norte case study in Nicaragua, farmers receive US$26/Ha/year to protect water resources by avoiding fires, developing organic agriculture, agroforestry and soil conservation practices and promote forest regeneration through improved management of livestock. Water users pay US$0.31/month to contribute to the fund. When the authors compare the funds that land-owners receive to protect water resources, it accounts for less than 10% of on- and off- farm income. That is a lot of responsibilities for very little monetary benefit, but land-owners actually reported that other benefits aside from monetary compensation such as technical assistance made it worthwhile.
From a poverty alleviation perspective, it is hard to see that any rural communities can actually benefit from such PES schemes. The monetary benefits are so small, and the commitments they have to comply with to receive that money seem fairly extensive and restrictive. Add in social and cultural contexts such as property rights and long-running land-use conflicts and it is difficult to see how these PES schemes were established in the first place. However, the devil might be in the detail. In the case of San Pedro del Norte the direct monetary benefits are small, but the direct effects of technical assistance and agricultural support that accompanies the PES seem to have positive impacts. Unfortunately there is no analysis of the increased (or decreased?) income from converting to organic farming.
I’m curious as to the criteria for selecting these case studies – are they representative of the many PES out there?
A recently published study has quantified and mapped aboveground live biomass across the Amazon. With all the possible opportunities for payment schemes for carbon through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and the possibilities through avoided deforestation, this dataset will surely be useful for looking at opportunities for poverty alleviation through payment schemes for carbon. The study used an innovative combination of satellite-based data, and ground-truthed plot measurements alongside some fairly complex algorithms to arrive at numbers of aboveground live biomass (AGLB). The data therefore captures the differences in AGLB depending on the different land-uses across the Amazon, and maps it out at 1km resolution. Note that the entire Amazon is found to have 86PgC. I had to look up what the Pg represents in PgC : Petagrams. That is 1015 g, or 1012 kg. An awful lot of carbon.
CIESIN have just released a new web portal which provides access to a number of very useful global datasets on human interactions with the environment. Some of the most interesting looking datasets available include the global map of human appropriation of net primary productivity which shows very high consumption of NPP as a percentage of available NPP throughout much of India, China, parts of the middle-east and Europe. South America appears to have very little consumption compared with the vast amounts of NPP available. Also of interest are the extensive datasets on poverty distribution, which include some variables such as child malnutrition on one quarter degree global grids.
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