Tesis Magíster
Missing Targeting Criteria in the Allocation of Market-based Instruments for Ecosystem Services in Chile: Lessons from a regional case study in Southern Chile.
Missing targeting criteria in the allocatión of market-based instruments for ecosystem services in Chile: lessons from a regiónal case study in southern Chile.
Autor
Jaramillo-Allendes, Amerindia Javiera
Institución
Resumen
Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) have become an increasingly widespread conservation approach, which advocates for being effective, efficient, and offering equitable solutions. PES’ core aim is to reward landowners who conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services (ES) for the positive environmental externalities they produce. Recently Chile, unlike other Latin-American countries with a long history in PES, has proposed a new market-based instrument for the conservation of ES. Since this policy is still under discussion, the timing seems propitious to support the design of this intervention. Thus, this study is focused on one of the “PES best design features” to foster additionality, that is, spatial targeting criteria for the allocation of payments. In this context, the paper analyses and proposes feasible targeting criteria to implement in PES programme in Chile, and besides it applies different targeting strategies for site selection using a regional case study in Southern Chile. This is done by adopting a Spatial Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) procedure supplemented by an expert consultation. The applied methodological framework consists of three main steps, firstly, a literature review of targeting criteria for allocation of PES is developed, then a set of targeting criteria for allocation of PES is selected, and finally, a GIS-based multiple-criteria scoring approach is used to construct different targeting scenarios for site selection in Panguipulli Municipality. The criteria selected to represent the proposed PES targeting strategy are the capacity of the farm to provide ES, landscape connectivity, threats to the ES provision and social equity variables (i.e. a limit on property size, targeting indigenous lands, poverty rates/social vulnerability). Applying those criteria, the modelled targeting strategies can be summarized as: (1) “MCDA scenario”, which depicts the results of the application of the MCDA to allocate PES; (2) “forest cover conservation”: this scenario included a PES focused on the protection of native forest areas understood as a proxy for ES provision, and ranking them by the landscape connectivity index (i.e. using heuristic rules); and (3) “ecosystem service provision”: this scenario encompassed payments centred on ES productivity (i.e. ecosystem service supply per unit of area). These spatial targeting scenarios are developed to understand the potential trade-offs between environmental effectiveness and equity matters involved in different site selection strategies at a farm-scale. Considering the Ecosystem Service Approach (ESA) as the underlying rationale of payments, which goes beyond exclusively PES effectiveness, different dimensions should be addressed in site selection. Particular attention should be placed on the potential distributional and welfare effects of different PES targeting strategies.
Thus, the study offers relevant guidelines and tool improvements for the design of PES schemes, showing how different spatial targeting criteria can direct payments to diverse social groups or landowners. This was done by emphasising the importance of aligning site selection strategies with the ultimate objectives of these public policies, especially when social-environmental trade-offs are at stake. This is particularly crucial because if Chile decided to make a PES focused mainly on environmental criteria, it could even reinforce pre-existing inequities and social justice issues regarding control over and access to natural resources in the targeted territories. PFCHA-Becas PFCHA-Becas