Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Citations relevant to this story are: Béné et al., 2009; Ogilvie et al., 2010;
CPWF, 2012d.
A final story that crosses categories (PN22 and Andes 1-4)
The final story, from the Andes, describes an example of a group of projects
with outcomes that bridged different categories. The categories were policy
change, community resource management, negotiations, development invest-
ment and research priorities.
Basins in the Andes that flow from east to west are short and steep. In
Ecuador and Peru, there is abundant rainfall upstream but little rainfall
downstream. Water use is concentrated downstream, while poverty is con-
centrated upstream. There are several upstream-downstream links that affect
different groups with different interests in different ways (see Box 5.5 in
Chapter 5). The principal link is that land and water management upstream
affects water quality and other ecosystem services (ESSs) for downstream users.
Everyone could be better off if institutional mechanisms were established to
share water-related benefits and costs.
Benefit sharing means ESS beneficiaries paying ESS providers for the ESSs
they provide. Cost sharing means making payments to provide ESSs by
promoting better land and water management upstream. Benefit-sharing
mechanisms (BSMs) are the means for downstream water users to make the
payments. They encourage upstream management that gives positive exter-
nalities (and discourage practices with negative externalities). BSMs can provide
incentives to use improved technical practices such as replacing intensive hillside
tillage with no-till agriculture, introducing tree crops, and many others.
Technical innovation required institutional change, for example to create
trust funds for collecting and making payments. The policy context was also
favorable because many Andean countries give high priority to maintaining
alpine ecosystems and to reducing poverty in highland communities.
Research outputs were important in taking decisions on the following
questions:
•
How should payments to ESS providers be targeted? (Hydrological
modeling to identify upstream areas providing ESSs.)
•
How should payments be used? (Research on upstream ecosystem
conservation measures and social development projects.)
•
How much should each class of ESS beneficiary contribute? (Estimate the
economic value of watershed services for different downstream ESS
users—used as reference values in negotiations about contributions to an
ESS investment fund.)
There were legal and institutional bottlenecks that hindered implementation of
institutional innovations for BSMs. Researchers participated in developing
legislation to address some of these bottlenecks:
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