Nudging service providers and assessing service trade-offs to reduce the social inefficiencies of payments for ecosystem services schemes

Brent D. Matthies, Tuomo Kalliokoski, Kyle Eyvindson, Nina Honkela, Janne I. Hukkinen, Nea J. Kuusinen, Petri Räisänen and Lauri T. Valsta

Environmental Science & Policy, 2016, vol. 55, issue P1, 228-237

Abstract: Socially inefficient payment for ecosystem services (PES) schemes result when adverse shifts in the provisioning of other ecosystem services (ES) or overpayment to service providers occur. To address these inefficiencies, a holistic evaluation of trade-offs between services should be conducted in parallel with determining land owners’ service provisioning preferences. Recent evidence also suggests that nudging stakeholders’ preferences could be a useful policy design tool to address global change challenges. Forest owners’ landscape management preferences were nudged to determine the impact on the social efficiency of PES schemes for biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation in Finland. ES indicators for biodiversity conservation, carbon storage, and the albedo effect were included with traditional provisioning services (i.e. timber) and bioenergy to assess the consequent intra-service trade-offs. Synergies in provisioning of regulating services were identified, but were found to be more efficient when the management objective is for biodiversity conservation rather than climate change regulation. Nudging led to marginal gains in service provisioning above the baseline management and above neutral owner preferences, and increased aggregate service provisioning. This demonstrates the importance of considering intra-service trade-offs and that nudging could be an important tool for designing efficient PES schemes.

Keywords: Payment for ecosystem services; Social efficiency; Trade-off; Nudging; Ecosystem service (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901115300927
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enscpo:v:55:y:2016:i:p1:p:228-237

DOI: 10.1016/j.envsci.2015.10.009

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental Science & Policy is currently edited by M. Beniston

More articles in Environmental Science & Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().