A new frontier for payments for ecosystem services
Dr Dan Richards' new publication describes how payments for ecosystem services could be used to support urban greening and conservation efforts.
Urban green spaces, including parks and private gardens, provide range of benefits, or ecosystem services to residents. These include cooling the air, reducing flood risk, and enhancing recreation and physical activity. However, urban green spaces are increasingly under pressure from urban development, partly because of a lack of funding to protect and improve them.
Dr Dan Richards published the paper external page Urban ecosystems: A new frontier for payments for ecosystem services in People and Nature with Benjamin Thompson from the National University of Singapore, describing how a financial mechanism called “payments for ecosystem services” could be used to support urban greening and conservation efforts. Payments for ecosystem services (PES) projects have so far been used in over 500 places around the world to provide funding for nature conservation projects. Almost all of these past examples come fromrural areas, but the idea has not yet been seriously applied in cities.
Dr Richards argue that PES holds great potential to support improvements in ecosystem services, because of the many beneficiaries of these serviceswho might be motivated to pay to support them. For example,restaurants that benefit from being located next to public parks could help support their upkeep. Similarly,insurance companies could pay homeowners to plant more vegetation to slow the flow of rain water and reduce flood risk, thus reducing their pay-outs to flooded properties.
To make PES happen in cities, better science to measure the benefits of urban ecosystems is needed. Also, groups of people who might be interested to pay to support urban greening and conservation need to be identified and linked to the landowners who manage urban green spaces.
Dr Dan Richards is research coordinator of the Natural Capital Singapore project, which objectives are to assess the current status and health of Singapore’s major ecosystems, and quantify their economic and societal value. This analysis will provide the first national-scale assessment of Singapore's natural capital, and the first assessment for a tropical, heavily urbanised country.