Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES)

Ecosystem services refers to the benefits that can be enjoyed by everyone that nature brings to wider society - clean water, forests, unpolluted air, etc - the services that sustain our planet. 

These services are often provided by smallholder farmers and landowners, who by the very nature of their work carry out conservation practices that benefit others, and increasingly incentive schemes are being implemented to ensure that these people upon which we depend, continue to provide these services.

'Payment for Ecosystem Services' are one kind of incentive scheme that have become successful in recent years, especially in the area of carbon storage and the maintenance of water quality, usually focusing on forest ecosystems.

They depend on the voluntary particpation of farmers or landowners to provide a well-defined service, or the land needed to provide it.

Payment is made by, or on behalf of, the service beneficiary/ies and can be made at the community level, such as school or farming equipment, or in cash payments to the service provider.

The sucess of these schemes has led to Bioversity taking forward innovative research to apply them to agrobiodiversity conservation. Our research is seeking to assess their effectiveness both in terms of cost and in conserving threatened species and varieties, as well as to alleviate poverty in smallholder farming communities.

Service providers are most likely to be smallholder farmers, living in remote areas of developing countries, who manage species, varities or breeds with unique adaptive traits (e.g. diseases resistance, drought tolerance). 

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