20.01.2022
The project “SinoPES”, coordinated by the ZALF working group “Governance of Ecosystem Services”, had its workshop on 17th January 2022 to discuss lessons learned from Germany and China about incentive-based policy instruments to protect ecosystem services in Germany and China.
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) have been discussed as one of the most promising tools in environmental governance. As an input for the workshop, the German research team gave a further-insight presentation about the conceptualization and practice of PES in China and Germany. It was accompanied by defining the core of PES, describing how PES are applied, and how the adoption of PES evolved over the last 30 years.
The main part of the workshop was a joint group discussion about the boundaries of PES considering country specific differences. The workshop participants collected contributions on synergies from pooling PES programs from Germany and China considering different terminologies and typologies. Furthermore, the group discussed risks of PES, such as crowding-out effects with intrinsic motivation and regulation.
The next step would be a further investigation of similarities and differences between important components considering the framework conditions in both countries (and even more countries like USA and Vietnam). All participants agreed to organize more workshops this year, keeping high hopes that the planned research visits, which had to be postponed due to Covid-19, can happen again in the near future.
Funding:
The "SinoPES" project is funded by the Sino-German Mobility Programme of the Sino-German Center for Science Research with DFG and NSFC.
Project partners:
- Leibniz Center for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF)
- Leibniz University Hannover (LUH)
- Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (HU)
- Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research (CAS)
- Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning (CAEP)
- South China Agricultural University (SCAU)
Further information:
