Resource information
The growing use of Payments for
Environmental Services (PES) for conservation has fostered a
debate on its effectiveness, but the few efforts to date to
assess the impact of PES programs have been hampered by lack
of data, leading to very divergent results. This paper uses
data from a PES mechanism implemented in Quindío, Colombia,
to examine the impact of PES on land use change. Alone among
all early PES initiatives, the Silvopastoral Project
included a control group of nonparticipants, whose land use
changes were monitored throughout the project period, as
well as detailed baseline data on both PES recipients and
control group members. By comparing the land use changes
undertaken by PES recipients to those undertaken by control
group members, we can distinguish the impact of PES from
that of other factors. The results show that payments had a
positive and highly significant impact on land use change,
under a variety of model formulations. PES recipients
converted over 40 percent of their farms to
environmentally-friendly land uses over 4 years, increasing
environmental service provision by almost 50 percent. In
contrast, control group members converted less than 20
percent of their farms, increasing environmental service
provision by only 7 percent.
