Current Projects
Navigating Implementation Challenges in Mexico's Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) Program
Role: Project Director
Colleagues: Julia Carabias and Elisa Castro (Natura y Ecosistemas Mexicanos), Esteve Corbera (ICTA-UAB), Lina Moros (UniAndes)
Funding: Tinker Foundation.
Timeline: 2024-2027
Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are popular incentive-based instruments that provide conditional economic payments for natural resources management, including forest conservation. Despite achieving significant gains, Mexico’s PES have suffered significant budget reduction, increased funding volatility, and erratic design changes in recent years. These implementation challenges are complicating enrolment for communities and hampering the work of implementers and intermediaries. These issues not only jeopardize PES participation but also risk increasing deforestation rates across the country, potentially undermining climate and biodiversity objectives, notably the 30x30 target of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
This project aims to explore the impact of these implementation challenges on PES outcomes in Mexico, assessing perceptions among national and local stakeholders, and to inform and support stakeholders—including implementers, policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and others—in enhancing PES strategies and building networks, thereby contributing to critical climate and biodiversity targets. The project is structured around three specific goals: first, to assess the impact of PES implementation challenges and stakeholder perceptions at national and local levels; second, to assist stakeholders in refining PES design and execution, aligning with global conservation goals; and third, to foster a global community of PES supporters to guide future efforts in Mexico and beyond.
The project brings together an organization and project team with extensive and complementary experience with PES –i.e. technical advisory, advocacy, and research– and encompasses three work packages (WP), each targeting distinct audiences and employing various methodologies: WP1) Applied research at national level and in a local case study in Selva Lacandona using spatial econometrics and field experiments, focusing on data analysis and dissemination among researchers and students through academic publications and conferences. WP2) Stakeholder engagement via policy workshops and training sessions aimed at policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and students, with outcomes shared through reports, policy briefs, and webinars. 3) Network building through the creation of a PES enthusiast community, facilitating knowledge exchange and collaboration across a broad spectrum of stakeholders, disseminated via a dedicated webpage and activities.
Through policy recommendations, scientific advancements, human capital development, network-building, and knowledge exchange, this project expects to bolster PES programs in Mexico and abroad, contributing to the achievement of ambitious global climate and biodiversity goals.
The Role of Forest Based Carbon Offsetting in Climate and Community Resilience: Multi-Scalar, Transdisciplinary Research with Indigenous Communities in North America
Role: Collaborator
Colleagues: Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza and Nicky Cagle (Duke University), Meredith Martin and Laura Arango (North Carolina State University), Andrea Alatorre (Universite du Quebec en Outaouais), Jessica Dempsey and Sara Nelson (University of British Columbia), Rosendo Pérez (Integradora de Comunidades Indígenas y Campesinas de Oaxaca (ICICO))
Funding: Duke University Climate Research Innovation Seed Program (CRISP)
Timeline: 2024-2025
While forest-based carbon offsetting (FBCO) holds potential for mitigating climate change, it is only one factor in the complex socio-ecological interactions that determine the resilience of these nature-based solutions. Our research for the CRISP award will be developed in close collaboration with Indigenous Communities, Tribes and First Nations (ICTFNs) from Mexico, the US and Canada with long term engagements with FBCO. Together we will explore the interlinkages between climate change mitigation through FBCO and the conditions, drivers and strategies that foster resilient forest and human communities in accordance with our ICTFN partner’s visons for their own futures. The three countries present distinct economic, political and policy contexts in which ICTFNs are engaging with FBCOs. By taking a two-pronged approach - conducting in-depth, nuanced field research with our partners in Mexico while also promoting cross-learning and co-production of knowledge among ICTFNs from across North America - we will, collectively, develop a comprehensive understanding of the contexts, conditions and project design and implementation principles necessary for engaging with FBCO in ways that can produce resilient forests and communities and where the opportunities and hazards may lie for other ICTFNs. The results of this multi-scalar, transdisciplinary collaborative research will: 1) suggest strategies for increasing resilience among our ICTFN collaborators; 2) inform ongoing debates on the environmental and social impacts of FBCO and, more broadly, best practices for increasing the resilience of forest-based and Indigenous communities; 3) serve as the foundation for longer-term funding proposals based on shared research agendas
Observatory for Climate Justice in Forest Landscapes Affected by Decarbonisation Processes
Role: Co-Investigator
Colleagues: Johan Oldekop, Charis Enns, Rose Pritchard, Lucas Alencar, Tomas Frederiksen (Manchester University); Israel Banegas (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México); Valerio Gomes (Federal University of Para), Iris Finn and Abdul Gafaru Abdulai (University of Ghana)
Url: https://www.staffnet.manchester.ac.uk/news/display/?id=32118
Funding: Ford Foundation
Timeline: 2025-2028
Past Projects
Forest Conservation on a Budget: Redesigning Payments for Ecosystem Services in Mexico.
Role: Co-Principal Investigator
Colleagues: Seema Jayachandran (Princeton) and Santiago Saavedra (U. Rosario)
URL: http://tinyurl.com/y5axuxqt
Funding: King Climate Action Initiative (K-CAI) at Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)
Timeline: 2020-2024
Mexico’s national forest protection program, Pago por Servicios Ambientales (PSA), is one of the largest Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs worldwide, but its funding has declined sharply recently. This project aims to study whether the program’s cost-effectiveness can be increased by modifying design features. Specifically, we will pilot test the impact of requiring PSA participants to enroll all or most of their eligible forested landholdings (i.e. full enrollment requirement), an evidence-informed innovation in PES schemes that was previously tested in a randomized trial in Uganda (Jayachandran et al. 2017, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aan0568), but is not used in PSA or most other national PES programs.
In partnership with Mexico’s national PSA implementing agency (Comisión Nacional Forestal, CONAFOR), a local conservation NGO (Natura y Ecosistemas Mexicanos), and Mexico’s IPA Country Office, we will pilot a ‘full enrollment’ PSA modified contract among a cohort of PSA applicants who were rejected due to budget constraints in one municipality of Selva Lacandona (Chiapas). We will assess the treatment’s impact on program take-up rates, avoided deforestation (converted into tons of CO2 abated to evaluate climate change mitigation impact), and participants’ income. The pilot may inform a full-scale randomized evaluation in Selva Lacandona.
Payments for Ecosystem Services: Long-Term Effectiveness and MOTIVations (PES-EMOTIVE).
Role: Co-Principal Investigator
Colleagues: Esteve Corbera and Sergio Villamayor-Tomas (ICTA-UAB), Lina Moros (UniAndes)
Funding: Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation
Timeline: 2020-2024
Global biodiversity loss and climate change mitigation are two of the greatest environmental challenges of our time. To partially address such challenges, Payments for Ecosystem or Environmental Services (PES) programs have disbursed billions of dollars of funding to rural communities and landowners in tropical and sub-tropical countries, conditional on the voluntary conservation of standing forests as a means of protecting biodiversity and reducing emissions from land-use change. As of today, there are still very few analyses of the effectiveness of such programs which compare similar neighboring forests with and without PES and control for contextual variables. These studies have examined the conservation of changes in forest cover over a short period of time and they have not accounted for people’s motivations for forest conservation and for local institutions as key factors that contribute to enhanced or reduced conservation, particularly when payments end.
PES-EMOTIVE aims to fill these gaps by analyzing how permanent the effects of PES programs on forest cover are in the long term and by exploring how PES participants’ motivations and local institutional contexts evolve and influence such effects. The project will be carried out in two regions of Mexico and Colombia, which host long-standing PES programs but have differing institutional contexts. We will adopt a multi-disciplinary approach that integrates quantitative land-use system science and social science methods. We hope to advance environmental and conservation science by, first, shedding light on the effectiveness of the studied PES programs; second, revealing the linkages and interactions between forest cover, motivations and the broader institutional context; and, finally, generating a database of people’s motivations to conserve forests at family-household level, which can will be used as a baseline for future research.
Promoting Local Engagement in Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES): A Biodiversity Monitoring Pilot in Chiapas.
Role: Principal Investigator
Colleagues: Jerome Dupras and Andrea Alatorre (UQO), Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza (Duke), Paulina Arroyo-Gerala (Natura y Ecosistemas Mexicanos)
Funding: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; Canada Research Chair in Ecological Economics.
Timeline: 2020-2021
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) have mushroomed since the late 1990s as key policy instruments for natural resource management across the world’s tropics. Though many PES schemes focus on biodiversity protection, local-level biodiversity monitoring is largely absent. There is thus a knowledge gap when it comes to our understanding of PES contributions to biodiversity and how to monitor them. In this study, we explore the potential for participatory biodiversity monitoring for community-based PES schemes. Following an assessment of the relative advantages of multiple biodiversity monitoring methods for assessing PES contributions to biodiversity, we conduct a participatory biodiversity monitoring exercise among PES participants in several communities in Chiapas (Mexico).