Payments for Ecosystems Services (PES) MRV protocols vs easy to implement strategies?

asked by Jose Castro Negrete on Tuesday 10th November 2009

Question

How could a balance be found between developing solid monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) protocols to generate credits as financial instruments, and more flexible, easy to implement strategies to establish payments for ecosystems services.

Certainly MRV protocols can increase quality assurance for ecosystem services (ES) credits, however developing methodologies, as well as verifying and issuing credits can take long time leading to a permanent loss of ecosystems. More straight forward strategies could prevent this from happening but this could increase risks of producing payments with no actual proof of services being provided. Where should the line be drawn? Based on which criteria?

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REDD, ecosystem services, MRV
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+1 #1 tgieseke 2010-05-09 02:30

Ecoservices are generated by land management activities that are heavily influenced by weather and climatic condition, among others. A stable ecosystem is a regulated ecosystem, that is the ecological activity 'manages' the variability. Enter human. Man-made economic activity does not regulate the ecosystems. So the moral of the story, ecoservice payments should be directed toward land management activities that provide stability to the natural capital. The natural capital then does the rest. Land management activities can be 'measured' via indices in the same perfect and incorrect manner that indices measure economic activity. Via indices the two economies can be connected.