Researcher evaluates the potential of paying for environmental services to protect water resources
You may have never heard of ecosystem services, also known as environmental services, but human life would be impossible without them. The purification of the air we breathe, the fertility of the soils that support agriculture and the supply of water we consume, among others, are some of the environmental services that nature provides us and without which we could not survive.
Although nature gives us these things for free, ecosystem services are continually threatened by human activity. For a farmer, for example, it may be more profitable to deforest his property and sell the wood, than to leave the trees in place and allow them to purify the air, protect the soil and contribute to water retention.
One of the mechanisms that has recently emerged to try to reconcile the interests of rural landowners with those of the population and the environment is the Payment for Environmental Services (PSA). This is a subsidy offered to owners in exchange for maintaining conditions on their farms that allow nature to continue providing environmental services. In turn, the public authorities can raise money for the PSA through agreements with companies that benefit from these environmental services or through taxes.
In her doctoral thesis, researcher Claudete Bezerra explored the potential of PSA in Brazil as a tool to protect water resources. In this sense, the use of PSA has already proven useful for preserving water sources and river basins in other places around the world, including Mexico, Costa Rica and some cities in the United States.
“In New York, for example, the sanitation company saw that the cost of water treatment was more expensive than paying rural producers to provide environmental services”, he explains.
Water resources
Currently, there are already several PES programs in Brazil to protect water resources. A paradigmatic case is the Water Conservation Program, in the municipality of Extrema, Minas Gerais, which has received dozens of awards in recent years. In São Paulo, the State Government launched the Mina d'Água Project in 2011, aimed at protecting springs in public water sources. In exchange for the PSA, owners are instructed to carry out certain activities, such as reforesting areas important for water resources or creating infiltration basins that promote groundwater recharge. However, a problem with the programs is the lack of indicators to assess their impact.
“In PSA programs, both in Brazil and around the world, you know how many trees were planted and how much was invested. But if we don’t have project monitoring, how can we really evaluate them?”, asks the researcher.
The search for indicators for PES programs was one of the aspects covered in Claudete's thesis. In particular, she looked at the case of Piracaia, one of the 21 municipalities in the State of São Paulo involved in the Mina d'Água Project. In a workshop with technicians from several public institutions and a subsequent meeting with researchers in the PSA field, Claudete and her collaborators evaluated and ranked different indicators. Afterwards, some of them were applied in the context of the municipality of Piracaia.
“I put into practice the % reforestation indicator on a rural property. The vegetation stage is still small [the project began in 2014], but you can already glimpse vegetation growth in the image. Another indicator is rural sanitation, which evaluates sanitary facilities, whether there is a bathroom on the property, whether it has a septic tank, etc.”
Although she considers that the PSA has many positive aspects and great potential, she identifies some obstacles to greater and better implementation of the PSA in Brazil.
Another fundamental point for Claudete is the lack of communication between the actors, especially between the State, city hall and rural producer. “It is necessary to make everyone assimilate to the project, understand the dynamics of the project”.
According to the researcher, one of the bottlenecks of the PSA is the lack of an appropriate legislative framework. “In Brazil, what we really lack is federal legislation. For example, Mexico and Costa Rica have federal law and federal funding. In Brazil we have three bills that are being processed, but we still have neither a federal law nor a fund. There is nothing that universalizes these services in practice.”
The thesis also launches a proposal for the creation of the Brazilian PSA Network, whose purpose would be to encourage, among other things, the exchange of experiences in different parts of the country, collaboration between researchers and the creation of monitoring tools.
Claudete's doctorate was carried out under the guidance of Professor Carlos Alberto Mariottoni and defended at the Postgraduate Program in Civil Engineering at the Faculty of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Urbanism (FEC) at Unicamp.
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