Payments for Farm Environmental Services

This book aims to expand the approach to environmental service payments. The book discusses two central ideas: (1) environmental services can be linked to agricultural production systems and management practices to combat poverty, and (2) poverty eradication should precede the provision of environmental services.Neither of these ideas is necessarily new. The connection between environmental services and agricultural production systems is evident in payment programs for...
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This book aims to expand the approach to environmental service payments. The book discusses two central ideas: (1) environmental services can be linked to agricultural production systems and management practices to combat poverty, and (2) poverty eradication should precede the provision of environmental services.Neither of these ideas is necessarily new. The connection between environmental services and agricultural production systems is evident in payment programs for agro-environmental services in most major economies. Meanwhile, poverty eradication policies and the fight against poverty also exist in many developing countries even without being linked to environmental services.Still, this work brings innovative ideas to these two central themes, proposing a range of simple indicators integrated at the farm level, where processes related to assessing the sustainability and quality of land use take place. These indicators follow clear objectives, incur low costs, and are easily applied using either computer systems or more conventional approaches.This book also deals with sustainability, seeking to recover the application of its most basic concept: how to ensure quality of life for both current populations and future generations.