Spatial Targeting of Payments for Ecosystem Services under Growth Uncertainties
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Spatial Targeting of Payments for Ecosystem Services under Growth Uncertainties James C. Mingie 1
& Seonghoon
Cho 1
Received: 4 June 2019 / Accepted: 11 November 2019/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Despite the impacts of economic growth uncertainty, few studies have explicitly focused on how payments for ecosystem services (PES) can account for uncertainty in their benefits and costs caused by economic growth fluctuations. The objective of our study was to identify spatial targets for county-level PES by maximizing the expected future cost efficiency of ecological benefits under two growth scenarios and compare them with counties targeted during baseline years (i.e., 2001, 2006, and 2011) without considering growth uncertainty. Results using a case study of forest-based carbon storage in the Central and Southern Appalachian region show that spatial targeting based on estimates of carbon-cost efficiency for baseline years is significantly different from spatial targeting based on expected future carbon-cost efficiency. Our county-level map of expected future carbon cost efficiencies will help conservation organizations identify a costefficient allocation of incentive payments that is robust to changes in economic growth fluctuations over time. Keywords Payments for ecosystem services . Carbon cost efficiency . Growth uncertainty .
Spatial targeting
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12061-01909329-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* James C. Mingie [email protected] Seonghoon Cho [email protected]
1
Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA
J. Mingie, S. Cho
Introduction Changes in land use are known to impact the status and integrity of ecosystems through habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation (Defries et al. 2007; Kremen et al. 2007; Magliocca et al. 2015; Rudel et al. 2005). Incentives offered to landowners in exchange for managing their land to supply ecological services (or payments for ecosystem services (PES)) have the potential to counter these land use changes. Recently, attention has focused on improving forest-based ecosystem services through PES to discourage deforestation and encourage afforestation. However, intervening in growth-driven forestland changes is not a simple task because forestland competes with other rentgenerating land uses such as urban development (Chomitz 2007; Geist and Lambin 2001; Myers 2008). A major challenge, however, is that the values of forest-based ecosystem services, commonly referred as positive externalities, are not captured in the value of forestland (Brander et al. 2010). Many past studies have focused on internalizing positive externalities into forest management and forestland changes (Bharrat 2008; Cho et al. 2017; Ferraro 2008; Fraser 2009; Kim and Cho 2018; Lubowski et al. 2006; Mason and Plantinga 2011; Sims et al. 2013; Wunder 2007). In this literature, land use models have been commonly used to estimate
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