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Payments for ecosystem services (PES), also known as payments for environmental services (or benefits), are incentives offered to farmers or landowners in exchange for managing their land to provide some sort of ecological service. They have been defined as "a transparent system for the additional provision of environmental services through conditional payments to voluntary providers."〔Tacconi, L. (2012). Redefining payments for environmental services. ''Ecological Economics'', 73(1): 29-36.〕 These programmes promote the conservation of natural resources in the marketplace. Ecosystem services have no standardized definition but might broadly be called “the benefits of nature to households, communities, and economies”〔(James Boyd and Spencer Banzhaf, What Are Ecosystem Services? The Need for Standardized Environmental Accounting Units. Resources for the Future Discussion Paper )〕 or, more simply, “the good things nature does." Twenty-four specific ecosystem services were identified and assessed by the ''Millennium Ecosystem Assessment'', a 2005 UN-sponsored report designed to assess the state of the world's ecosystems. The report defined the broad categories of ecosystem services as food production (in the form of crops, livestock, capture fisheries, aquaculture, and wild foods), fiber (in the form of timber, cotton, hemp, and silk), genetic resources (biochemicals, natural medicines, and pharmaceuticals), fresh water, air quality regulation, climate regulation, water regulation, erosion regulation, water purification and waste treatment, disease regulation, pest regulation, pollination, natural hazard regulation, and cultural services (including spiritual, religious, and aesthetic values, recreation and ecotourism). Notably, however, there is a “big three” among these 24 services which are currently receiving the most money and interest worldwide. These are climate change mitigation, watershed services and biodiversity conservation, and demand for these services in particular is predicted to continue to grow as time goes on. One seminal 1997 ''Nature'' magazine article estimated the annual value of global ecological benefits at $33 trillion, a number nearly twice the gross global product at the time.〔(Robert Costanza et al. The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital. )〕 In 2014, the author of this 1997 research (Robert Costanza) and a qualified group of co-authors re-took this assessment - using only a slightly modified methodology but with more detailed 2011 data - and increased the aggregate global ecosystem services provisioning estimate to between $125-145 trillion a year. The same research project also estimated between $4.3 to 20.2 trillion a year of losses to ecosystem services, due to land use change. Some PES programs involve contracts between consumers of ecosystem services and the suppliers of these services. However, the majority of the PES programs are funded by governments and involve intermediaries, such as non-government organisations. The party supplying the environmental services normally holds the property rights over an environmental good that provides a flow of benefits to the demanding party in return for compensation. In the case of private contracts, the beneficiaries of the ecosystem services are willing to pay a price that can be expected to be lower than their welfare gain due to the services. The providers of the ecosystem services can be expected to be willing to accept a payment that is greater than the cost of providing the services. ==Organizations and motives for incentivizing production of ecosystem services== Though the goal of all PES programs is the procurement of some sort of ecosystem service, the reasons why organizations or governments would incentivize the production of these services are diverse. For example, the world's largest and longest running PES program is the United States' Conservation Reserve Program,〔 which pays about $1.8 billion a year under 766,000 contracts with farmers and landowners to “rent” a total of what it considers “environmentally-sensitive land.” These farmers agree to plant “long-term, resource-conserving covers to improve water quality, control soil erosion and enhance habitats for waterfowl and wildlife.”〔 This program has existed in some form or another since the wake of the American Dust Bowl, when the federal government began paying farmers to avoid farming on poor quality, erodible land.〔 In 1999, the Chinese central government announced an even more expensive project under its $43 billion Grain for Green program, by which it offers farmers grain in exchange for not clearing forested slopes for farming, thereby reducing erosion and saving the streams and rivers below from the associated deluge of sedimentation. Notably, some sources cite the cost of the entire program at $95 billion.〔 Many less extensive nationally funded PES projects which bear resemblances to the American and Chinese land set-aside programs exist around the world, including programs in Canada, the EU, Japan and Switzerland.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Payment for ecosystem services」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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