Assessing the efficiency of payments for biodiversity conservation: A bio-econometric analysis of Natura 2000 contracts in forest

Emeline Hily, Serge Garcia, Anne Stenger () and Gengyang Tu

No 2015-01, Working Papers - Cahiers du LEF from Laboratoire d'Economie Forestiere, AgroParisTech-INRA

Abstract: In this article, we empirically assess the efficiency of Natura 2000 contracts in forest, a payment for environmental service (PES) scheme, aiming at biodiversity conservation. To do so, we perform a bio-econometric analysis of public and private contracts in France. We estimate a cost function for biodiversity provision, in which the level of biodiversity output is quantified by a biodiversity index value. Estimation results show that payments for Natura 2000 contracts are inadequately defined. While payments’ definition considers opportunity costs linked to landvalue, the latter neglects opportunity costs associated with foregone profits from timber production. This impedes satisfactory participation, especially from private forest owners, whose forests could bring interesting results in terms of cost-efficiency. We show that the cost elasticity of biodiversity provision is significantly lower than one, suggesting to implement ecologically more ambitious contracts with lower average costs. Public owners are able to bear higher opportunity costs than private owners.

Keywords: Resource management; Payment for environmental service; forest; biodiversity index; provision cost of biodiversity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C31 D04 Q23 Q57 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2015-01, Revised 2015-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-eff and nep-env
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