Linkages between social protection and the environment

6 Protecting people and the environment: Lessons learnt from Brazil’s Bolsa Verde, China, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, South Africa and 56 other experiences Social security The notion of social security adopted here covers all measures providing benefits, whether in cash or in kind, to secure protection, inter alia, from:  lack of work-related income or insufficient income caused by sickness, disability, maternity, employment injury, unemployment, old age, or death of a family member;  lack of access or unaffordable access to health care;  insufficient family support, particularly for children and adult dependants; and  general poverty and social exclusion. Social security schemes can be of a contributory social insurance or non-contributory nature. Social assistance Social assistance refers to schemes or programmes that provide benefits to vulnerable groups of the population, especially households living in poverty. Most social assistance schemes are means-tested. Cash transfer programmes and conditional cash transfers CCTs A cash transfer programmes is a non-contributory scheme or programme providing cash benefits to individuals or households, usually financed out of taxation, other government revenue, or external grants or loans. Cash transfer programmes may or may not include a means test. Cash transfer programmes that provide cash to families subject to the condition that they fulfil specific behavioural requirements are referred to as conditional cash transfer programmes CCTs. This may mean, for example, that beneficiaries must ensure their children attend school regularly, or that they utilize basic preventative nutrition and health-care services. Source: ILO, 2014. 2.3. What are payments for environmental services? Between 1960 and 2000, the world population doubled and the global economy increased more than sixfold. This has led to increasing demands on natural assets, eventually resulting in loss of ecosystems. In fact, a recent assessment revealed that over the same period, nearly two-thirds of global ecosystem services were in decline Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005, p. 5. Since the provision of environmental services ES that protect ecosystems are generally non-valued financially by the users of these services, one response to the threat to ecosystems was the development of payments for environmental services PES in the 1990s. PES can be described as “a way to financially internalize externalities”, meaning that they create a market for ES by translating external, non-market values of the environment into real financial incentives for land managers to provide these services Noordwijk and Leimona, 2010, p. 1; Sommerville et al., 2009. The literature does not provide a consensus on the definition of PES. The most commonly used and accepted definition is given by Sven Wunder 2005, p. 3, senior economist at the Center for International Forestry Research CIFOR in Brazil. He defines a PES as: 1. a voluntary transaction where 2. a well-defined environmental service or a land use likely to secure that service 3. is being ‘bought’ by an environmental service buyer at least one 4. from an environmental service provider at least one Protecting people and the environment: Lessons learnt from Br azil’s Bolsa Verde, China, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, South Africa and 56 other experiences 7 5. if and only if the environmental service provider secures the provision conditionality. Those who have evaluated PES interventions in practice have found that most interventions aiming to implement PES do not meet all of these criteria Sommerville et al., 2009. Even Wunder himself says, that “there are probably very few true PES” complying with all five elements of his definition Wunder, 2005, p. 4. Nevertheless, since both scholars and practitioners of PES, such as CIFOR and the Katoomba Group’s Ecosystem Marketplace, use this definition, this is the definition that will be referred to in this paper. Attempts to take the variety of PES schemes into account include a trial to develop alternative vocabulary. Thus, in the literature one can also find the terms such as compensation and rewards for ecosystem services CRES, rewards for environmental services, and payments for ecosystem services. Terminology that includes ‘compensation’ or ‘rewards’ reflects the fact that benefits are not necessarily cash payments. They can include non-financial incentives, including the provision of access to various types of capital human, social, natural, physical, and financial Noordwijk and Leimona, 2010. The term ‘ecosystem services’ used by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment MA refers to positive benefits that people obtain from ecosystems. Unlike environmental services, this also refers to provisioning services such as food, fibre, and timber Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005, p. V, 27; Sommerville et al., 2009. There are also attempts to classify different categories of PES, such as payments for watershed services PWS, or to categorize them according to their scale including regional and international payments for environmental services. Nevertheless, the term payments for environmental services remains the most widely recognized one. Therefore, it will be used for the purposes of this paper. Environmental services are commonly classified into four categories:  Carbon sequestration: aims at the long-term storage of carbon in woody biomass and soil organic matter. As buyers and sellers can be located anywhere in the world, it is considered a ‘global’ market. An example is an electricity company, which pays farmers to plant and maintain additional trees.  Watershed protection: aims at providing an adequate amount of good quality water as well as at controlling flooding, erosion, and soil salinization. Since buyers and sellers live in the area that is to be protected, it is considered the most regional or local ES. An example is downstream water users private companies or households that pay upstream farmers for adopting land use that limit deforestation, flood risk, andor soil erosion.  Biodiversity protection: aims at conserving areas that maintain biodiversity. This can originate at the international level or at a more local level. The sellers have to be situated in the protected area while this is not necessarily the case for the buyers. An example is when conservation donors compensate local people for protecting or restoring areas with large biodiversity.  Landscape beauty: aims at maintaining natural sources of inspiration and culture, as well as commerce by eco-tourism. As with biodiversity protection, this ES can take place at the international or on a more local scale as buyers can, but do not need to be, located in or close to the protected area. An example is a tourism operator that pays a local community for not hunting in an area used for tourists’ wildlife viewing. While some of these services might be traded together e.g. protected biodiversity is also attractive for tourists, there can also be trade-offs between these services e.g. a fast-