Evidence is emerging that PES schemes promote inclusive and sustainable use of natural capital.
Nairobi, 3 August 2016: Around the world, interest is emerging in payment schemes that reward individuals and communities for conserving ecosystem services – the benefits humans derive from ecosystems. PES schemes are intuitively appealing because they offer the prospect of harnessing economic incentives for environment and development gains.
To date, tens of millions of dollars have been invested in PES projects - from South Africa to Costa Rica to New York City. Despite widespread interest and investment in PES, surprisingly few programmes have been carefully evaluated.
Detailed evaluations of conservation interventions can help improve these interventions and stem the decline of biodiversity.
The Global Environment Facility (GEF) funded a PES project in western Uganda between 2010 and 2014, called “Developing an Experimental Methodology for Testing the Effectiveness of Payment for Ecosystem Services to Enhance Conservation in Production Landscapes in Uganda”.
The project focused on the conservation of private forests, and was implemented in the non-protected areas between the forest reserves of Bugoma and Budongo in the Albertine rift in western Uganda, specifically in about 140 villages in the Hoima and Kibaale districts. The two reserves form part of the northern corridor for chimpanzees - a corridor that connects further south to Kibale National Park.
Forest loss in Uganda is estimated to be about 1 to 2 per cent per year, with an even higher rate on private land. Uganda is one of the African countries that have been discussing the involvement of the private sector in biodiversity conservation.
The roughly US$1 million project was funded by the GEF and aimed to test the effectiveness of PES as a viable means for financing biodiversity conservation outside protected areas. UNEP secured GEF funding, provided technical/institutional substantive support, and supervised the quality and timeliness of project execution in terms of finances, administration and achievement of outputs and outcomes.
Uganda’s National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) with its local collaborator the Chimpanzee Sanctuary and Wildlife Conservation Trust (CSWCT), the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), and local partners, including the Business Development Facility and the East Africa Katoomba Group, implemented the project on about 800 hectares. It provided incentives to some 400 farmers (private forest owners) in 68 villages for conserving biodiversity in forests on private and public land not gazetted as forest reserves.
Training of local people was one of the many beneficial spin-offs of the project. The project trained local resource users in the application of land-uses to maximize biodiversity maintenance; and national partners were trained to oversee the maintenance of biodiversity and payment compliance, which led to an increase in the number of national and community stakeholders who understand the design and implementation of a PES scheme. In addition, the project facilitated the establishment of monitoring schemes.
By making forest conservation a livelihood opportunity for local communities, a payment scheme can provide social benefits as well as meeting environmental objectives.
The target area is home to some of Uganda’s largest chimpanzee populations living outside protected areas. Clearing of forests for cash crops such as tobacco and rice in the area is threatening the survival of these chimpanzee populations, and risks isolating the populations in the Budongo and Bugoma reserves, thus halting natural inter-breeding across different populations. The loss of these forest habitats is also threatening other ecosystem services, especially carbon storage and access to clean water.
Surveys done for the project concluded that the corridor forests are relatively rich in species and provide the function of linking larger forest blocks, and hence metapopulations of certain species that require these corridors to maintain viable populations.
Comparing outcomes such as deforestation rates between those who take-up the programme and those who do not would overstate the benefits of PES: People who would have conserved anyway are more likely to participate, leading to an estimated “impact” that is biased due to self-selection. Therefore, the evaluation used random assignment of treatment and control villages to obtain an unbiased estimate of the effect of PES. The random assignment of treatment and control villages allowed for the provision of a clear measure of the additional forest cover generated by the PES programme.
The project results provided empirical evidence of the effectiveness of the PES scheme for the Government of Uganda, and outside Uganda, the project’s value extended to conservation practitioners, multilateral aid agencies, and donors calling for more rigorous assessments of conservation investments.
Outcomes
Based on the findings, the PES programme reduced self-reported forest-clearing behaviour by private forest owners. Remote sensing analysis showed that there was an increase in forest cover caused by the programme. Also, private forest owners patrolled their land more and restricted others from accessing their land; the programme reinforced the sense of private land ownership.
More specifically, the project led to the following outcomes:
- 1. 60% of participants said the project reduced their tree-cutting behaviour.
2. Analysis of the field data suggests that the PES scheme has reduced deforestation and increased reforestation, although the overall difference was fairly small (the rate of deforestation was 1.64 percentage points lower in treatment than in the control villages).
3. Reforestation results improved over time. Natural regeneration was preferred to reforestation through tree planting.
4. The PES scheme helped reduce the rate of deforestation, and firewood collection.
A June 2016 report titled Cash for carbon: A randomized controlled trial of payments for ecosystem services to reduce deforestation by the US National Bureau for Economic Research, provided a comprehensive assessment and concluded: “Tree cover, measured using high-resolution satellite imagery, declined by 2% to 5% in treatment villages compared to 7% to 10% in control villages during the study period. We find no evidence of shifting of tree cutting to nearby land.”
It also says the social benefit of delayed CO2 emissions due to the project was roughly twice the cost of the project. “PES appears to be an effective way to reduce CO2 emissions” it concludes.
“PES schemes address market failures by aiming to change the behaviours that have led to biodiversity loss, and the Uganda PES project’s results provide a positive case that PES schemes offer a new source of income for land management, restoration, and conservation,” says UNEP expert Ersin Esen.
One unanticipated but very positive result of the project that has helped strengthen the institutional framework for PES in Uganda has been the creation of a forum of NGOs and community-based organizations – the Northern Albertine Rift Conservation Group (NARCG) – which is focused on the conservation of the Northern Albertine Rift region, said the November 2015 terminal evaluation report on the project.
Other benefits were that project partners collaborated on activities such as participation in international workshops and meetings e.g. the Evaluation Workshop in Kampala, and International Evaluation Training in Italy. CSWCT also now forms part of the Uganda chapter of the Poverty and Conservation Learning Group, an IIED initiative led by IIED’s biodiversity team.
Given that the project coordinator at NEMA is also the Convention for Biological Diversity focal point for Uganda, the project continues to be well linked with the national and international biodiversity agenda. Importantly, the Technical Steering Committee convened by NEMA provided a platform of multi-stakeholder involvement in the project including government, local government, private sector and non-governmental organizations.
For more information, please contact: Ersin.Esen: Ersin.Esen@unep.org
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