Dataset Information

The effectiveness of Payments for Ecosystem Services at delivering improvements in water quality: lessons for experiments at the landscape scale.

ABSTRACT: Background:Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) are used in impact evaluation in a range of fields. However, despite calls for their greater use in environmental management, their use to evaluate landscape scale interventions remains rare. Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) incentivise land users to manage land to provide environmental benefits. We present the first RCT evaluation of a PES program aiming to improve water quality. Watershared is a program which incentivises landowners to avoid deforestation and exclude cattle from riparian forests. Using this unusual landscape-scale experiment we explore the efficacy of Watershared at improving water quality, and draw lessons for future RCT evaluations of landscape-scale environmental management interventions. Methods:One hundred and twenty-nine communities in the Bolivian Andes were randomly allocated to treatment (offered Watershared agreements) or control (not offered agreements) following baseline data collection (including Escherichia coli contamination in most communities) in 2010. We collected end-line data in 2015. Using our end-line data, we explored the extent to which variables associated with the intervention (e.g. cattle exclusion, absence of faeces) predict water quality locally. We then investigated the efficacy of the intervention at improving water quality at the landscape scale using the RCT. This analysis was done in two ways; for the subset of communities for which we have both baseline and end-line data from identical locations we used difference-in-differences (matching on baseline water quality), for all sites we compared control and treatment at end-line controlling for selected predictors of water quality. Results:The presence of cattle faeces in water adversely affected water quality suggesting excluding cattle has a positive impact on water quality locally. However, both the matched difference-in-differences analysis and the comparison between treatment and control communities at end-line suggested Watershared was not effective at reducing E. coli contamination at the landscape scale. Uptake of Watershared agreements was very low and the most important land from a water quality perspective (land around water intakes) was seldom enrolled. Discussion:Although excluding cattle may have a positive local impact on water quality, higher uptake and better targeting would be required to achieve a significant impact on the quality of water consumed in the communities. Although RCTs potentially have an important role to play in building the evidence base for approaches such as PES, they are far from straightforward to implement. In this case, the randomised trial was not central to concluding that Watershared had not produced a landscape scale impact. We suggest that this RCT provides valuable lessons for future use of randomised experiments to evaluate landscape-scale environmental management interventions.

SUBMITTER: Pynegar EL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6202973 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

The effectiveness of Payments for Ecosystem Services at delivering improvements in water quality: lessons for experiments at the landscape scale.

Pynegar Edwin L EL Jones Julia P G JPG Gibbons James M JM Asquith Nigel M NM

PeerJ 20181023

<h4>Background</h4>Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) are used in impact evaluation in a range of fields. However, despite calls for their greater use in environmental management, their use to evaluate landscape scale interventions remains rare. Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) incentivise land users to manage land to provide environmental benefits. We present the first RCT evaluation of a PES program aiming to improve water quality. <i>Watershared</i> is a program which incentivises landowne ...[more]

PMID: 30386694

Similar Datasets

Project description:Payment for hydrological services (PHS) are popular tools for conserving ecosystems and their water-related services. However, improving the spatial targeting and impacts of PHS, as well as their ability to foster synergies with other ecosystem services (ES), remain challenging. We aimed at using spatial analyses to evaluate the targeting performance of México's National PHS program in central Veracruz. We quantified the effectiveness of areas targeted for PHS in actually covering areas of high HS provision and social priority during 2003-2013. First, we quantified provisioning and spatial distributions of two target (water yield and soil retention), and one non-target ES (carbon storage) using InVEST. Subsequently, pairwise relationships among ES were quantified by using spatial correlation and overlap analyses. Finally, we evaluated targeting by: (i) prioritizing areas of individual and overlapping ES; (ii) quantifying spatial co-occurrences of these priority areas with those targeted by PHS; (iii) evaluating the extent to which PHS directly contribute to HS delivery; and (iv), testing if PHS targeted areas disproportionately covered areas with high ecological and social priority. We found that modelled priority areas exhibited non-random distributions and distinct spatial patterns. Our results show significant pairwise correlations between all ES suggesting synergistic relationships. However, our analysis showed a significantly lower overlap than expected and thus significant mismatches between PHS targeted areas and all types of priority areas. These findings suggest that the targeting of areas with high HS provisioning and social priority by Mexico's PHS program could be improved significantly. This study underscores: (1) the importance of using maps of HS provisioning as main targeting criteria in PHS design to channel payments towards areas that require future conservation, and (2) the need for future research that helps balance ecological and socioeconomic targeting criteria.

Project description:Ecosystems provide life-sustaining services upon which human civilization depends, but their degradation largely continues unabated. Spatially explicit information on ecosystem services (ES) provision is required to better guide decision making, particularly for mountain systems, which are characterized by vertical gradients and isolation with high topographic complexity, making them particularly sensitive to global change. But while spatially explicit ES quantification and valuation allows the identification of areas of abundant or limited supply of and demand for ES, the accuracy and usefulness of the information varies considerably depending on the scale and methods used. Using four case studies from mountainous regions in Europe and the U.S., we quantify information gains and losses when mapping five ES - carbon sequestration, flood regulation, agricultural production, timber harvest, and scenic beauty - at coarse and fine resolution (250 m vs. 25 m in Europe and 300 m vs. 30 m in the U.S.). We analyze the effects of scale on ES estimates and their spatial pattern and show how these effects are related to different ES, terrain structure and model properties. ES estimates differ substantially between the fine and coarse resolution analyses in all case studies and across all services. This scale effect is not equally strong for all ES. We show that spatially explicit information about non-clustered, isolated ES tends to be lost at coarse resolution and against expectation, mainly in less rugged terrain, which calls for finer resolution assessments in such contexts. The effect of terrain ruggedness is also related to model properties such as dependency on land use-land cover data. We close with recommendations for mapping ES to make the resulting maps more comparable, and suggest a four-step approach to address the issue of scale when mapping ES that can deliver information to support ES-based decision making with greater accuracy and reliability.

Dataset Information

The effectiveness of Payments for Ecosystem Services at delivering improvements in water quality: lessons for experiments at the landscape scale.

Publications

The effectiveness of Payments for Ecosystem Services at delivering improvements in water quality: lessons for experiments at the landscape scale.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets