Revising Payment for Ecosystem Services in the Light of Stewardship: The Need for a Legal Framework

Abstract

Abstract:Since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) highlighted the importance of ecosystem services for human well-being, the payments for such services have increasingly been drawing the attention of governments, the private sector and academia. Nonetheless, there is not yet a specific legal framework which is able to capture the complexity of managing natural resources and, at the same time, deal with the numerous drawbacks that have been identified by critics, who are opposed to using financialisation of the environment as a tool. This paper, after briefly summarizing some of the main features and criticisms of the Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES), will critically assess the understanding of property rights over natural resources as stewardship, rather than as entitlement, because this interpretation is more coherent with the inherent characteristics of natural resources and, consequently, of ecosystem services. The novel usage of a stewardship dimension to property rights underlines the necessity for a legal framework for PES, constituted by "property-liability rules".

Payments for Ecosystem Services: Rife With Problems and Potential—For Transformation Towards Sustainability

“…By providing payments for particular actions, incentive programs specify or imply a set of rights and responsibilities that may change the way people perceive entitlements and appropriate actions. In the ecosystem services literature, researchers have noted that PES might shift our understanding of our rights and responsibilities towards ecosystems (Solazzo et al, 2015;Mauerhofer et al, 2013;. Most PES systems are structured such that beneficiaries of ES pay those directly responsible for an ecosystem ("ES providers") not to degrade (e.g., downstream water users pay upstream farmers to reduce sedimentation and eutrophication of waterways).…”

Valuation of public goods and ecosystem services provided by agriculture

“…land owners) property rights and the responsibilities towards the whole community and society has been seen as a major weakness in payments to ecosystem services [18; 23]. Moreover, some authors consider that as long as the payments have legal imperfections; and are not to guarantee an effective protection to ecosystem services, they could not been implemented [23].…”

Análise dos programas de PSA brasileiros frente às boas práticas de gestão ambiental recomendadas internacionalmente

“…KOSOY; CORBERA; BROWN, 2008;PISTORIUS et al, 2012;YIN et al, 2019); esclarecer sobre o direito de propriedade (e.g. MEYER et al, 2015;SOLAZZO;COOPER, 2015;WUNDER, 2013); e a existência de pagamentos maiores que os custos de provisão dos prestadores de SE (e.g. ENGEL, 2016;FORTMANN et al, 2016;WUNDER, 2013), dentre outros, são exemplos apontados como indicadores de sucesso de programas de PSA na literatura.…”