“To guarantee long-term sustainability of a payment or reward for environmental service (ES) project, the principle of equity must be embedded in project design. If we want a system that pays people to look after the environment and we want to make sure that the system lasts, then fairness has to be built into the system from the start.
As another layer to transaction cost and part of effectiveness though less compatible with cost and efficiency, equity should be contextualized and well aligned to perceived fairness among communities where the project is ongoing.” Even though being fair might make the system a bit more expensive and complicated, the system will last longer if the communities who are doing the work feel they are being treated fairly.

That was the conclusion from a three-day workshop on “Equitable Payments for Ecosystem Services: Experience in Managing the Equity-Efficiency-Effectiveness Trade-off” organized by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and CARE in Nairobi, Kenya, (14-16 April 2010).

The workshop was aimed at sharing experiences about promoting a fairer payment system for “environmental services” (such as local communities being paid or rewarded in other ways for protecting or expanding forests) without making any such system much more complicated or inefficient.

The participants agreed that there were gaps between theory and practice in managing the so-called “triple trade-offs” (equity-efficiency-effectiveness) in the field of payments or rewards for environmental services.

Dr Meine van Noordwijk, Chief Science Advisor of the World Agroforestry Centre, gave a keynote speech about three ideas he called “Commoditized ES” (CES, environmental services that are treated as commodities), “Compensation for Opportunities Skipped” (COS, being paid for not doing something that may harm the environment) and “Co-Investment in Stewardship” (CIS, working together to protect the environment and make money).

He said the three concepts help answer some of the questions about the different ways people who serve the environment by protecting it interact with people who receive the benefits (such as cleaner air, reduced global warming and healthier land and food).

Other speakers talked about how to know if an environmental services project was fair or not; that including local people from the start was crucial to success; that ‘being fair’ involved finding out who owned which property, how to distribute payments in a community, getting information from and to everyone rather than just one person or one group and dealing with what people felt was fair and what wasn’t.

People from different organisations who had worked together on environmental services projects in East Africa talked about their experiences, which were mostly to do with measuring and researching carbon stocks in the environment and schemes to study and protect watersheds.

Thomas Yatich, Program Coordinator of PRESA (RUPES’ sister project in Africa) gave a talk about the five principles adopted by the project: efficiency, effectiveness, acceptability, pro-poor and sustainability. He also told everyone about some recent PRESA activities in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Guinea.

During the workshop, groups also discussed the core issues: benefits, costs and risks of payments for environmental services, triple trade-offs, benefit sharing, fair contracts and negotiations, policy and governance, monitoring and what effects such schemes may have on local communities.