Welcome to the June 2011 PRESA E-News

Welcome to the 8th edition of the PRESA newsletter.

From July 2011, PRESA and the Katoomba Group will merge their newsletters to provide you with a comprehensive outlook on payments for environmental services from Africa and the rest of the world.

For this issue, we feature the first steps we have taken in using science-based evidence to turn research to action by embarking on a pilot scheme in payments for watershed services at Sasumua, Kenya. Watch out for updates on the long and winding road to negotiations, as we harmonise knowledge and understanding with the ambitions of various stakeholders. We expect this story to end in a happily-ever-after situation involving a fair and efficient contract between land owners in the Sasumua watershed and a buyer.

As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions.

Happy reading!

Fertile ground for rewards for environmental services in Uganda

Strengthening local institutions is key in ensuring the involvement of smallholder farmers in payments for environmental service (PES) deals. PRESA worked with Nature Harness Initiatives (NAHI) in Uganda to prepare local stakeholders to participate in carbon PES along River Wambabya in the Albertine Rift, and watershed PES at the Rushebeya-Kanyabaha wetland.

The work involved cataloguing the potential sellers, intermediaries and private-sector buyers of environmental services in the two landscapes. Awareness creation was conducted among potential sellers at community level. These included existing groups and networks of land owners, forest owners, people engaged in forest and wetland-based enterprises, parish wetland management committees and other users of forest and wetland resources.

The potential buyers included Kisiizi Hospital Power Company (at Rushebeya-Kanyabaha) and British American Tobacco and McLeod Russel Uganda( at Wambabya). Dialogue on PES was initiated among the potential buyers and government institutions. At the Wambabya riverine forest system, the two private sector companies have contributed greatly to ecosystem conservation in their areas of operation.

At the Rushebeya-Kanyabaha wetland, NAHI brought together all key stakeholders in a workshop. An action plan was developed calling for an uncultivated reserve of at least 5 metres from the river banks, in return for support in promoting alternative income generating activities. The Kisiizi hospital hydro-dam management expressed willingness to pay for the management of the wetland. There are high hopes that this will be the first payments for environmental services scheme in the area.

NAHI, with PRESA support, assisted individual forest owners to develop their respective forest restoration plans. 110 such plans are being implemented under the Sustainable Ecosystems (Forests and Fresh water) management project in Uganda, supported by British American Tobacco.

Beyond its collaboration with PRESA, NAHI used the maps and forest management interventions generated with PRESA in a World Bank and United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) project intended to institute a payment scheme for selected forest owners.

“The main objective of our work with PRESA is to establish institutional frameworks to facilitate reward mechanisms for environmental services in Rushebeya-Kanyabaha and Wambabya,” says NAHI.

Click here to download the full report by NAHI [PDF, 1.2MB).

Training workshops on payments for environmental services to be held in Nairobi, Kenya, 8 – 12 August, 2011

Can payments for ecosystem services (PES) - including revenues from projects focused on reducing emissions from degradation and deforestation (REDD+) - create new incentives for sustainable land use management in Africa? What are the opportunities? And what risks exist, for whom?

These questions, and more, will be at the core of a workshop, jointly offered by the World Agroforestry Center and the international Katoomba Group with support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The workshop on Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) and Reducing Emissions from Degradation and Deforestation (REDD+) runs from 8 to 9 August 2011. Participants will include policy makers, private sector stakeholders, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from Cameroon, Guinea, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.  The content will focus on providing participants with the following:

• An introduction to PES and REDD+
• A set of guidelines for selecting the most promising PES and REDD+ sites, and
• An overview of how PES can be implemented. 

The second workshop, scheduled for 10 to 12 August 2011, and also jointly offered by the World Agroforestry Center and the international Katoomba Group, will train project implementers (mainly NGOs) from Kenya and Uganda on social impact assessment in the design and implementation of PES projects.

We will be posting regular updates on the PRESA website as the event draws closer.

Towards a rewards scheme for cleaner water

The Sasumua reservoir in Kenya supplies the capital city, Nairobi, with 20% of its fresh water needs. Through various studies at the Sasumua landscape, PRESA generated evidence linking improved watershed services to good land-use practices such as terraces, contour farming, grass filter strips and grass waterways.

We even went ahead to quantify watershed services and estimate the expected costs and benefits of the said land-use practices. We conducted studies on willingness to pay among potential buyers, and willingness to accept payments among potential sellers.

With this package of evidence, we made a case for a rewards-based approach for enhancing Sasumua watershed management, to a multi-stakeholder meeting at the World Agroforestry Centre headquarters in Nairobi. The meeting included government, local community representatives, NGOs and the Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company.

The evidence showed that more than 50% of sedimentation was generated from privately owned plots, which cannot be easily influenced to adopt the recommended land-use practices. PES could be a cost-effective approach where savings from reduced water-treatment costs could reward and motivate farmers to engage in catchment conservation. All stakeholders agreed to this approach.

100 landowners at Sasumua in hot-spot areas expressed willingness to participate as potential suppliers of environmental services for improved water quality. These are already organised in a Water Resources Users Association (WRUA) under the Water Resources Management Authority (WRMA). The question was where the finances for such a scheme would come from. There were two options: the Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company or the Water Services Trust Fund to which the Nairobi water company makes annual water abstraction payments as required by the Water Act of 2002.

Dialogue continues with potential buyers to determine how to address these legal and institutional limitations.

If successful, the Sasumua work could be a break-through in establishing evidence-based payments for watershed services. Lessons could be replicated by other water resource user associations in Kenya.

Carbon payments for watershed management

Who said carbon cannot pay for water? PRESA facilitated the expansion of Ecotrust's work on Trees for Global benefits to enable farmers growing trees in the River Mobuku watershed in Uganda to access carbon payments. Mobuku River watershed lies at the foothills of the Rwenzori Mountains.

This article is a summary of activities by Ecotrust Uganda and PRESA, intended to get farmers into carbon offsetting.

Read the article here.

Showing them how it works

PRESA is in the process of setting up prototype schemes for environmental service payments in Guinea to demonstrate how the rewards approach can address ecosystem degradation at the Fouta Djallon highlands.

A prototype scheme for watershed service payments is getting established in the Coyah area, east of Conakry, to demonstrate to the Coyah water bottling company how a reward for environmental services scheme might be implemented. The company is interested in buying watershed services from communities.

In addition, another prototype scheme is to be set up deep in the Fouta Djallon highlands, at Balayan Souroumba. Here, the plan is for biodiversity payments based on critical chimpanzee habitat maps. The work at Balayan Souroumba is supported with funding from the United Nations Development Programme.

Testing rewards for environmental services at the Uluguru Mountains

Building on research on willingness-to-accept among potential environmental service sellers, who are local landowners, PRESA set up a prototype payment mechanism at our site in the Uluguru Mountains. Contracts were developed with 200 households for planting 20,000 tree seedlings of Khaya anthotheca (an indigenous timber tree), Tectona grandis (teak) and Faidherbia albida (an indigenous tree that improves soil fertility and provides firewood. In exchange, farmers are get 300 Tanzania Shillings (US$0.20) a year for each surviving seedling.

A year after establishing these mechanisms, farmers are expressing willingness to continue managing the trees even when payments stop completely. The training they got on tree planting, the free seedlings they received, and the expected additional benefits from tree products are enough to satisfy farmers' payment demands.

What started off as a conditional, commoditized payment mechanism has evolved into a co-investment type with less emphasis on conditionality.

News briefs

Nyando and Yala basins Kenya:
The Western Kenya stakeholders' consortium at the Nyando and Yala river basins will continue to make the case for publicly-funded payments for environmental services. Meanwhile, PRESA and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) are working on an atlas of environmental services for the Nyando and Yala basins. The atlas will be produced by synthesizing information accumulated from various projects.

Upper Tana basin:
PRESA participated in the project design of TanNRM, a programme proposed by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) to tackle land degradation in the upper catchment of the Tana River in Kenya.

Usambara Mountains:
We are currently studying the feasibility of reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) at the East Usambara Mountains in Tanzania. The focus is on land use trade-offs, benefit sharing and delineation of sub-national REDD interventions.

Researchers and communities see things differently

A recent analysis highlights the difference between the academic and the practical concept of ecosystem services. It suggests that academic science aims to discover and apply general and timeless concepts to measure ecosystem services, whereas in practice, stakeholders’ valuations of ecosystem services vary with place and time.

The term ‘ecosystem service’ was first used in the early 1980s to provide a framework for understanding ecosystem processes in terms of their contribution to human well-being. Since then, a growing body of research has discussed how to value ecosystem services so that these services are acknowledged and the ecosystems that provide them are conserved.

The researchers argue that the academic literature about ecosystem services relies on a conceptual basis that differs dramatically from the kinds of information that stakeholders depend on when evaluating ecosystem services.

Ecologists and other scientists seek knowledge that is centralised, collaborative, replicable, and based on consensus. In contrast, the information used by stakeholders to set values tends to be dispersed, temporary, local and dependent on existing practices and institutions.

The analysis illustrates this difference with three well-known examples of ecosystem services: pollination of citrus and almond trees by bees, pest control by birds and wastewater treatment by wetlands.

Read the detailed analysis here ....

Other news

Farmers benefit by providing environmental services

More trees on farms

Global forestry institutions call for more community-based forest management

Another Missing Link in Climate Change Policy: Trees Outside Forests

Putting trees on farms fundamental to future agricultural development

Mapping the Value of Watershed Services

Upcoming events