Barkah News

What occurs when funding for conservation ends?

Payments for Environmental Services (PES), also referred to as conservation payments, are a well-liked method for halting deforestation and preserving tropical forests.

The tactic is to give land managers conditional rewards in the form of cash or in-kind benefits in exchange for their active support of forest protection. The idea is to increase the financial value of standing forests over chopped ones. This indicates that the amount paid for forest protection must be more than the opportunity cost of preventing deforestation, or the money lost by giving up economically dependent on deforestation activities (like large cow ranching and swidden agriculture).

The majority of PES impact evaluations show some progress in stopping deforestation and preserving forests. However, little is known about how long-lasting conservation successes are when funding is stopped.

We summarized the key conclusions of our impact assessment of a REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, while Enhancing Carbon Stocks) initiative in the Brazilian Amazon that compensated smallholders for reducing deforestation in an infobrief. To begin addressing the lack of information regarding post-project persistence, we specifically examined the degree to which conservation outcomes continued beyond the project's conclusion.

As a first step in our study, we postulated four possible outcomes for the permanence of forest conservation from PES (see the paragraph that follows). Each of the four scenarios, which are arranged from the most hopeful to the least optimistic, was based on the premise that PES significantly decreased deforestation. However, the scenarios varied in terms of what happened after payments stopped.

Scenario 1: Permanence of deforestation reduction: Following the termination of payments, the trend of reduced deforestation is maintained.

Scenario 2: Durability of conservation gains: deforestation picks back up, but it doesn't recover the deforestation that was prevented.

In the third scenario—zero-permanence—deforestation rates rise until they "catch up" with the amount of deforestation that was lost.

Scenario 4: Negative-permanence: Over time, deforestation rates rise and lead to unfavorable conservation consequences.

Our PES-REDD+ impact evaluation revealed that Scenario 2 best matched the actual results. Our calculations show that PES preserved 7.8% of the forest cover on average per property, but only during the period of continuous payments. Former participants continued deforestation after compensation, but not at a rate that would have undone the results of prior forest conservation efforts. This indicates that although the reduction in deforestation was not permanent, the benefits made in PES conservation were.

Our findings may teach PES implementers and donors most importantly—that you get what you pay for, at the time of payment. Therefore, long-term PES programs are preferred because they enable longer-lasting reductions in deforestation.

Nevertheless, the benefits in forest conservation realized during payments were maintained after the project concluded, meaning that even the temporary PES examined here had a long-lasting project permanence. 

Therefore, PES did not completely stop deforestation; rather, it acted as a helpful trend break, preserving forests for the purpose of mitigating climate change and other co-benefits throughout the duration of the intervention and beyond.

Source Forests  News