Desire for Greener Land

any establishment costs. Overall, land users paid 36% of the
overall establishment costs (median value), the rest being
subsidized by projects or the government. However, more
than half of the technologies are fully maintained on land
users’ expenses. Experiences from other evaluations show
that support for the land users for the establishment can be
very helpful and lift the production to much higher levels. As
long as the maintenance costs are fully covered by the land
users, there are good chances of the system continuing without
dependencies on external inputs. As such, costs can be a
barrier for poor land users, even if their investment would
pay off in the end. Having said this, it is necessary for any
investment to also evaluate the benefits; the costs are only a
valuable criteria when compared to the associated benefits.
Cost-benefit ratio
Cost and benefits are extremely difficult to assess, but are
obviously a crucial factor in justifying SLM interventions.
The basic problem is the lack of hard and reliable data 14 .
Furthermore, non-economic costs and benefits are not perceived
in the same way by different people and WOCAT
is therefore interested in a subjective assessment by the
authors. Many authors had difficulties in deciding what to
include and what monetary value to attribute to inputs
and benefits, which made a comparison rather difficult.
Regardless of these difficulties, the bottom line is that without
a positive perception of benefits, land users or donors
are unlikely to invest in SLM.
Figure 31 shows that for most technologies, the long-term
benefits in relation to costs (of any type) are positive to very
positive. However, the picture for the short-term benefits is
somewhat different. The short-term benefits are negative in
relation to establishment costs for a significant number of
technologies, especially in the water management, cross-slope
barrier and forest management groups. This implies that most
implementations of SLM technologies can be expected to give
negative returns on investment in the first 1-3 years, and in
order to generate economic value from the SLM technologies
in the long term (5-10 years), land users will need support from
revolving funds, PES, or other financial mechanisms.
Figure 30 confirms the observation made earlier that the
Water Management technologies are the most expensive
ones. Their cost-benefit ratio in the short term is therefore
mostly negative or even very negative. Exceptions to this
pattern include the recharge well in Tunisia and the transport
of freshwater in Greece, although they are both very
expensive. For the cross-slope barriers, only one of the tech-
Spain, Erik van den Elsen
nologies (terraces China) has a slightly positive cost-benefit
ratio. More than half of the forest management group also
have negative or even very negative cost-benefit ratios. An
exception here is the prescribed fire from Portugal, due to
its immediate benefit in preventing more damaging wildfire.
In the long term, all investments made for the establishment
are giving a positive return. Regarding maintenance, 83%
of the cases perceived positive, or at least neutral, benefits
within the first five years. In the long term, the maintenance
inputs gave positive returns in all cases. It is only some of the
cropping management technologies that remain at a neutral
to slightly positive level.
Adoption
In 62% of the cases, the land users have implemented the
technology with external material support (eg payment,
subsidised machinery) and in 38% of cases, they have done it
wholly voluntarily. From the figures available, there are over
4000 families who are engaged in sustainable land management
within the DESIRE study sites.
More than half of the technologies report a growing spontaneous
adoption trend, see Figure 31. For others it is too
early to know. Of course, not all technologies are suited
to spontaneous adoption by land users. Some technologies
require high initial investments, which need to be provided
by a project or through subsidies.
Adoption trend of technology
14 WOCAT, 2007
Analysis of assessed SLM technologies and approaches across DESIRE sites DESIRE – WOCAT 2012
3
10%
9
30%
6
20%
8
27%
4
13%
no
little
moderate
strong
n.a. | too early
DESIRE - WOCAT 2012
Figure 31: Adoption trend towards (growing) spontaneous
adoption of the Technology.
57