Payment for Nature Conservation
I thought it would be only natural that land owners in Indonesia would care deeply about their plot of land and the environment. As of recent decades there has been massive land clearance resulting in devastation and loss of life.
Now, there is a proposal to pay landowners to preserve the environment as Panca Nugraha explains from Mataram, Lombok:
Paying poor rural landowners to maintain and preserve the environment would improve natural resources management and alleviate poverty, organizers of a global environmental workshop reportedly said.
Sponsored by the World Agroforestry Center (WAC), the workshop addressed the concept of payment for environmental services. The WAC researches and develops integrated agricultural sciences in Mataram, West Nusa Tenggara.
Meine van Noordwijk, the regional coordinator of the Bogor-based International Center for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF), said the concept of paying for environmental services was simple.
It involves people living near resource-rich environments, who actively safeguard and manage the environment around them, he said. The concept holds that these people should receive a payment for their service from governments or other organizations that use these natural resources, he said.
The concept is an improvement on previous methods of protecting and sustaining natural resources, he said. It will also create a market through which impoverished rural landowners can increase their incomes.
Van Noordwijk cited as an example negotiations between inhabitants of forested lands in Himalaya, India, and a nearby hydro-power plant last year. A deal was arranged in which the inhabitants received US$54,000 a year for protecting the hydro plant’s water supply.
Indonesia’s Gerhan program, which involved replanting trees at riverbanks, could benefit from implementing payments for such services, Van Noordwijk said.
“This program is good and the government has allocated a lot of money to it, but it has not worked as well as expected,” he said.
He said the program had not paid enough attention to locals involved in the replanting process. The government had requested their involvement but neglected to ask for their input on the process, he added.
He said that as a result, the program was unsuccessful and the locals’ poverty went unaddressed.
“In Lampung we have facilitated a contract between the people of a village who live near a hydro power plant. If the people manage to maintain the water flow and the river’s cleanliness until May, they will receive a payment for this service,” he said.
Beria Leimona, ICRAF’s associate research officer, said the group had developed six programs for environmental service payments to the poor in parts of Asia.
“In short, payments for environmental services constitute a combination of environment conservation and poverty alleviation,” she said.
The week-long workshop, which ends Friday, is being attended by 150 experts and practitioners from America, Africa, Europe and Asia.
Panca Nugraha