Payments for Ecosystem Services and Geospatial Data for Environmental Conservation

Climate change severely impacts human health and livelihoods in developing countries and continuing warming risks substantially increasing global poverty. Protecting ecosystems in low-income countries is crucial to climate mitigation and adaptation, and payments for ecosystem services (PES) are a promising tool to do so while directly benefiting poor, rural communities. PES schemes follow a simple economic logic: compensate landowners for conserving ecosystems with global benefits. This model marries climate change mitigation with economic development, providing sustainable sources of income that don’t rely on ecosystem destruction. Central to designing effective PES programs is ensuring that they yield “additionality,” or conservation that would not have occurred without payments, however, self-selection into PES programs tends to limit additionality as those who would anyway conserve their land, even in the absence of the program, have the highest incentive to enroll.

Meghalaya, in Northeast India, is among India's largest carbon sinks and has been experiencing increasing deforestation in recent years. We work with the state government of Meghalaya to evaluate variations of a state-wide PES program with the goal of boosting the scheme's additionality, thereby generating valuable local and global climate benefits. The variations of PES introduced in this project rely heavily on geospatial data: based on past deforestation and other baseline variables, we target program enrollment by predicted deforestation risk using machine learning algorithms.