Sandra Derissen and Uwe Latacz-Lohmann
The term PES is often used to denote market incentives for the provision
of public goods within the field of environmental and resource issues.
In this context, PES translates into either ‘payments for environmental services’ or ‘payments for ecosystem
services’—the terms that are not consistently defined in the literature
and sometimes used as synonyms. Given the lack of coherent definitions,
this note reviews current definitions of payments for ecosystem
services and payments for environmental services entertained in the
literature, discusses alternative meanings of environmental and
ecosystem services in the PES context, and finally proposes a consistent
definition. We argue that current definitions of PES found in the
literature are insufficient to adequately describe the man-made nature
of many environmental goods and services: that nature is ’produced’
through human intervention. Building upon the FAO's definition of
environmental services, we propose a definition that regards
environmental services as services provided through countryside
management in a broader sense whilst produced either unintentionally or
intentionally.
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| Credit: http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/mother-nature-s-sum-4226/ |
