Livelihood and Environmental Impacts of Payments for Forest Environmental Services: A Case Study in Vietnam

Abstract

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) is widely employed in various settings; however, whether, and in what contexts, PES programs achieve their objectives by improving local livelihoods and conservation goals is still being debated. This paper aims to evaluate the impacts of payments for forest environmental services (PFES) policies on livelihoods and the environment using propensity score matching of data on 725 systematic randomly selected households in the buffer zones of seven protected areas (PAs) of Quang Nam and Thua Thien Hue provinces in Central Vietnam and data from the General Statistics Office and Landsat. The findings indicate that the PFES policy has some positive effects on economic and environmental issues for different groups. In terms of financial capital, the study found that poor households with PFES have slightly higher income than what they would have had they not participated in PFES. The difference in total income between poor households with and without PFES, however, was statistically insignificant, while the income of non-poor households with PFES was significantly higher than those without PFES. In addition, PFES households are likely to have more consumption expenditure for their daily living and better access to loans from various microfinance sources compared to those without PFES. The PFES policy has provided slight changes in the forest and forest cover and reduced natural forest loss between the pre-PFES and PFES periods. The findings of this study contribute to designing future PFES policies that can better distribute benefits to all household groups as well as harmonize social and natural capital.

The Policy of Ecological Forest Rangers (EFRs) for the Poor: Goal Positioning and Realistic Choices—Evidence from the Re-Employment Behavior of EFRs in Sichuan, China

“…Most previous studies focus on the direct effects of the PESs, and comparing the differences by different policy enforcement methods, no researchers have yet to evaluate the consistency of PESs positioning goals and realistic choices by the perspective of policy re-participation. Some researchers have pointed out that the effect of the PES project is hugely controversial [39]. Some scholars have found that the enforcement of ecological compensation policies can significantly improve the quality of the ecological environment [29][30][31]38], but some scholars have pointed out that the enforcement of ecological compensation policies may not provide environmental benefits and ecological protection effects.…”

“…Besides, different PES programs might have different impact on poverty alleviation. Some researchers argues that the PES programs with direct cash payment can significantly reduce the incidence of poverty and narrow the poverty gap and the internal gap among the poor population, but it is insufficient to drive the endogenous development of poor individuals [39], while compensation for public welfare posts can effectively drive the endogenous development of poor individuals to a certain extent [34][35][36][37]. Many researchers agree that PES has emerged as an important policy instrument for ecosystem protection and poverty alleviation [24,52,53].…”

“…Effective supervision and excitation are the key to ensuring that PES programs achieve a win-win situation of "poverty reduction and environmental protection [42]. On the contrary, some studies have pointed out that PESs did not meet the established goals and failed to achieve the synergy of "poverty reduction and environmental protection" goals [25,39,43]. The main influencing factors for the failure of PESs to achieve the established goals or the conflict between goals and practice include unreasonable policy and system design, poor property rights [25,49], insufficient multi-level agency supervision [25,45], government system or law enforcement is not strict [22,46], and local government or community participation is insufficient [25,[45][46][47].…”

“…The existing literature mainly focuses mainly on the payments for environmental services (PES) project system design [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13], target positioning [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28], implementation effect evaluation [21,24,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42], the consistency of the target and behavior [26,39,[42][43][44], and the factors that affect target deviation [22,26,39,[45][46]…”

Integrating Ecosystem Services Supply, Demand and Flow in Ecological Compensation: A Case Study of Carbon Sequestration Services

“…Payments for ecosystem services (PES) provide a flexible approach to problem-solving that can transform uncompensated externalities into economic incentives that are important for protecting ecosystems, coordinating regional development, and achieving the SDGs [10][11][12][13]. PES has been scaled up globally to enable sustainable management of ecosystem services [14][15][16][17][18][19]. As of 2017, there are more than 550 global PES schemes with an annual transaction value of $36-42 billion [20], covering a wide range of ecosystems such as water [21], forests [22,23], agricultural land [24], and oceans [25].…”