Analyzing the provision of ecosystem services by conservation easements and other protected and non-protected areas in the Upper Chattahoochee Watershed

Institutional analysis of actors involved in the governance of innovative contracts for agri-environmental and climate schemes

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19 cases of result-based, collective, land tenure and value chain contracts from six countries are analyzed.

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Innovative contracts involve a higher number and more diverse actors than mainstream agri-environmental and climate schemes.

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Actors perform 16 critical roles in contract governance, often sharing or taking on several roles.

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(Non-)Performance of roles can potentially affect contracts’ environmental effectiveness.

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Which actors take on which role is context-dependent.

In this study, we used institutional analysis to investigate the design of innovative contracts for agri-environmental and climate schemes. The aim of such contracts is to better incentivize farmers for the provision of environmental public goods in comparison to current ‘mainstream’ contracts. For the analysis, we differentiated four contract types: result-based, collective, land tenure, and value chain contracts. To represent each type in the analysis, we selected 19 case examples from six European countries. Cases were identified through a mix of methods, combining literature review, web search, and expert consultation. After a structured data collection based on Ostrom’s institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework, we focused our analysis on the involved actors and their roles in contract governance. Our results highlight the great diversity of public, private, and civil actors involved from the local, regional, national or international governance level, each performing one or several critical roles in contract governance. We found that it is highly context-dependent which actors assume certain roles. We also discuss how provision of environmental public goods through the contracts might potentially be impacted by certain roles and their assignment to specific actors.

Trade-offs Between the Value of Ecosystem Services and Connectivity Among Protected Areas in the Upper Chattahoochee Watershed

The Upper Chattahoochee Watershed supplies most of the drinking water to the Atlanta Metropolitan Area, a region with one of the fastest urban growth rates in the United States. Smart conservation planning is necessary to conciliate urban development and the provision of critical ecosystem services (ESs) such as water quality, carbon storage, and wildlife habitat. We employed optimization models to compare the value of the ESs provided by alternative allocations of land parcels for conservation. We adopted boundary penalties to determine the trade-offs of choosing higher connectivity among parcels regarding economic values provided by carbon storage, wildlife habitat, and water quality. We used InVEST models to quantify and map ESs and value transfer to assign economic values to them. We set low and high ESs economic value bounds and discounted their values to perpetuity using 3% and 7% discount rates. Our results indicate that incorporating boundary penalties results in solutions with larger, fewer, and more connected parcels but yields lower economic benefits than unconstrained models. However, these differences are relatively small (between 2.6% and 7.3% loss in economic value). Additional transaction costs of purchasing more parcels and improving ecological networks provided by larger forest patches might justify the selection of solutions with higher connectivity. Decision-makers can use the developed models for estimating the economic cost of selecting connected parcels for conservation purposes at the landscape level.