Field Experiments on Environmental Payment Programs:Insights from L. America, Africa and Asia

Posted on August 7, 2017 by administrator

By Prof. Rohit Jindal

Dr. Rohit Jindal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Decision Sciences at MacEwan University School of Business. He holds a PhD from Michigan State University (USA) and an MSc from the University of Edinburgh (UK). He has previously worked at University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business and in the Department of Resource Economics at University of Alberta. He is a Banting Fellow of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the highest level award for postdoctoral work in Canada. Dr. Jindal has published his research in top international journals such as World Development, Land Use Policy, and Ecological Economics. He works on the crosscutting themes of international environmental policy and sustainable resource management

Abstract of the talk:

Environmental payment programs are a recent policy innovation under which local land stewards receive payments for producing valuable ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration and erosion control. Also known as payments for ecosystem services (PES), such payment schemes have become common in many parts of the world and are the focus of the Paris Climate Agreement under its performance based emission reduction system. It is expected that when fully operational, such PES-type emission reduction activities will be worth billions of dollars, with most of the money flowing to developing countries. Recent research has focused on answering field level questions pertaining to feasibility of PES, the optimal price to pay for PES contracts, and impact assessment of existing projects. The proposed research talk had been aimed to deepen this understanding by examining behavioral aspects of environmental payments. It combined two studies carried out by the author and his team.