Payments for Ecosystem Services: Getting Started. A Primer - UNEP

Payments for Ecosystem Services: Getting Started
A Primer
Watershed Protection Services
What?
To provide high-quality and reliable quantities of water in a watershed, sellers might offer
to implement, for a fee, specifi c natural resource management practices or activities.
How?
• Restoring, creating, or enhancing wetlands for the purpose of compensating for
damage or destruction to another wetland area
• Maintaining forest cover
• Reforesting, possibly with a focus on specifi c (often native) tree species
• Adopting ‘sustainable’ or ‘best’ land use management practices, such as from
sustainable farming or sustainable forestry
Why?
Actions would be selected to provide some, or all, of the following benefi ts:
• Creating or maintaining natural fi lters in the watershed to reduce water pollution
• Maintaining vegetation in order to aid in regulation of water fl ow through the year
• Controlling for fl oods
• Minimizing soil loss and sedimentation
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Online Water Quality Trading Tool: NutrientNet
NutrientNet uses both site-specifi c information (provided by the user)
and geographical data to estimate nutrient loadings. This estimation
tool can be adapted for any watershed and used to perform nutrient
calculations using locally accepted calculation methods, delivery
factors, and trading rules.
For point sources participating in a trading program,
NutrientNet uses:
• current fl ow and nutrient concentrations to determine whether
the source is over or under their permitted discharge limit, and
• a balance sheet to track each source’s credits.
For estimating non-point source nutrient loadings, NutrientNet
offers various methodologies for calculating nutrient reductions.
Since agricultural non-point sources may differ between watersheds
and water quality trading programs, the relevant stakeholders in the
trading program must agree upon which NutrientNet calculation
methodologies they plan to use.
Finally, NutrientNet has a Geographical Information System (GIS)
mapping interface which can be used to pinpoint the location of
the relevant operation or facility and provide any underlying spatial
information needed to estimate nutrient loadings. Market participants
can input zip codes as well as either aerial photos or a reference
map to locate their farm and delineate where a conservation best
management practice (BMP) will be implemented or installed. Various
data layers underlying the map contain information such as soil type
and texture, area, delivery factors, soil type and texture, and runoff
volume, which can be used in the estimation of nutrient loadings.
For more information see www.nutrientnet.org.
Measurement?
Water quality issues are perhaps the
easiest components to measure, while
other hydrological dynamics related to
fl ow (quantity of water) are more diffi cult.
While many watersheds lack suffi cient
data, it may be possible to learn from
measurements and relationships from
similar watersheds where such data is
available.
For example, efforts are being made to
create basic guidelines for specifi c areas.
In the case of Andean ecosystems, for
example, a series of overall guidelines
have been developed by Marta Echavarria,
of Ecodecision, for the Tropical America
Katoomba Group (available at www.
katoomba group.org). In addition, tips
on land use and hydrology from a 2007
meeting of hydrological experts are
summarized below.
You may be tempted to extrapolate data
from other watersheds to your own project,
or at least satisfy the certainty demands
of some buyers. This may work, but more
often does not, and you must exercise
extreme caution when doing so because
watershed dynamics can vary greatly.
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