How to pay for ecosystem services

New investments in conservation are needed to halt and reverse the rapid and extensive changes to ecosystems driven by growing human demands for natural resources. A major barrier is matching viable financing solutions to conservation projects. Recent conservation finance studies catalog available financing options but do not provide adequate guidance on which financing pathways are suitable for a particular conservation project. Studies in the natural capital literature identify activities that best serve the conservator's objectives but typically fail to address the question of how to pay for them. We attempt to bridge these literature sources by providing a framework for identifying the specific conditions that must be satisfied by a project in order for an existing financing mechanism to be viable. Notably, our framework quickly reveals financing approaches that can be eliminated. We demonstrate the utility of this approach through conservation case studies on establishment of native forests, coral reef restoration, oyster restoration, and island biosecurity.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment

• Publication date

  2023-10-12

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1002/fee.2680
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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