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CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance
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This chapter discusses the history of PES in developed and developing countries and illustrates its challenges and opportunities by means of concrete cases. The cases include projects designed to provide different environmental services (clean water, carbon sequestration, biodiversity preservation, etc.) apply- ing different public PES schemes as well as public private partnerships. The experience indicates that the lack of financial sustainability of PES projects is a major reason for the reversibility of environmental improvements once external funding stops. Long-term financial sustainability can however be achieved, if PES projects allow for the creation of markets for environmental goods driven by innovative local entrepreneurs. Such hybrid PES schemes may be especially ade- quate for developing countries that face financial constraints on different levels.
The linkages between agriculture and the environment are complex. Some regard agriculture primarily as a threat to environmental services while others believe that sustainable farming practices must become an integral part of the provision of these services. Those who agree with the former view tend to see payments for environ- mental services (PES) as a tool to compensate farmers and pastoralists for restricting their economic activities in environmentally valuable areas. Those who endorse the latter view, however, make direct payments to land users conditional upon the adoption of sustainable practices that mitigate the impact of their activities on the environment and thus help ensure the provision of environmental services. The history of PES can therefore largely be divided into agri-environmental policies that tend to be either ‘use-restricting’ (focused on the avoidance of negative externalities) or ‘asset-building’ (focused on the creation of positive externalities). The use-restricting policies have their origins in the environmental legislation passed in the United States in the 1970s, while the asset-building policies are linked to the concept of multifunctional agriculture that is aimed at remunerating farmers for the adoption of sustainable practices. This concept evolved in the 1990s in Europe and must be partially understood as a response to the geopolitical changes after the end of the Cold War and the adoption of the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1994. As a consequence of the end of the Cold War, policy makers found it more difficult to protect farming in the name of national security, and the interests of taxpayers and consumers had to be considered to a much greater extent in agricultural policy. As a
Samuel O. Idowu - Personal Name
1st Edtion
978-3-319-19345-8
NONE
CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance
Management
English
Springer Cham Heidelberg
2016
London
1-159
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