Ecosystems and Poverty

Visitors of this week’s World Social Forum 2009 in Belém (Eastern Brazilian Amazon) will hear a lot about the good and evil of conservation payments as a means to achieve Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD).
Passionate opponents of conservation payments fear that nature’s wonders will be put on sale once international negotiations have paved the way towards including REDD as a mitigation option in a Post-Kyoto regime. Fierce promoters of such payments praise its superior economic efficiency and potential for poverty alleviation as opposed to conventional approaches to halt deforestation in the Amazon.
Both are most likely wrong. What we need is a shift of paradigms in the debate about environmental policies. Too often, the debate centers on what the right choice of policy instrument could be when it should focus on how policies could be better designed and implemented. Too often, policy instruments seem to become mere placeholders for the political ideologies of those that promote them. In fact, virtually all policy instruments will most likely do more harm than good if poorly designed and implemented without recognizing institutional, political, and socio-economic particularities of a given context.
A sober debate on how to fix the environmental, social and economic ills in the Amazon should remain open for all potentially effective options. This includes incentives or compensations, where conservation implies unbearable opportunity costs, disincentives where greed is the cause of environmental degradation, and enablement where individuals lack alternatives to resource overuse.
While conservation payments or Payments for Environmental Services (PES) are relatively new in the environmental policy tool box, the underlying concept of conditional cash transfer is a common component of policies in other sectors, e.g. social assistance. Researchers from the Amazon Initiative Consortium have recently finished a report for the Brazilian Ministry of Environment, which analyzes the potential of PES in the context of the Brazilian Amazon. The results confirm the above notion that REDD in the Amazon will not come about as a result of either carrots or sticks. With over 90% of private land tenure being poorly defined and numerous overlaps of incompatible public land tenure categories, recipients of payments for REDD will be hard to identify. Moreover, ambitious, but un-enforced environmental legislation means that few PES options are legally additional, at least from a national perspective.
Hence, the good news for all worrywarts: Only few investors may end up being interested in buying environmental services from the Amazon unless the basic conditions for such investments are in place. Let’s make best use of our time in the meanwhile and figure out how to make sure that local dwellers in the Amazon are not loosing out when we compensate the emissions from our long distance flights to the World Social Forum.