Defra provided £274,000 of funding for 11 Payments for Ecosystems Services (PES) pilot projects between 2011 and 2013 aimed at improving water quality, managing the flood risk, and improving the local ecosystem, and now a new funding round will be offered during 2014/15.
The PES pilots allows a “willing buyer” of an ecosystem service, such as catchment mangement, to voluntarily pay a “seller” or landowner to adopt a series of measures to ensure the provision of that ecosystem.
The scheme aims to improve and manage ecosystems where they provide public good but where “incentives to pay are weak”, Defra said.
In a review of the first two funding rounds, Defra found that the eleven schemes “were able to demonstrate preliminary proof of concept” and that the PES scheme “can deliver cost effective environmental outcomes”.
Catchment based projects, such as those undertaken on the Fowley River and Tortworth Brook, have delivered “cost effective water quality improvements” and Defra stated these types of projects “can be considered closer to market stage”.
The Tortworth Brook pilot developed a PES concept based on integrated constructed Wetland (ICWs) to remove nutrients from the water, and this has been included in Wessex Water’s proposals for PR14.
However, Defra added that there is no perfect PES scheme, and that “this suggests the PES is a set of principles rather than standards”.
Despite the lack of a “textbook example”, the government says that “PES-like and quasi-PES schemes can deliver valuable environmental benefits”.
The other pilot projects funded in the first two rounds of the PES scheme were: Hull flood risk; Poole Harbour catchment; South Pennines; Peatland Code; Leeds-Liverpool Canal; Pumlumon; the River Lea in Luton; Visitor Giving Schemes; and a Cotswolds Catchment project.