- 20 May 2013
This blog was created as part of the original Valuing Nature Network (2011-2014)
I'm very much looking forward to going to Bristol on Wednesday to take part in a workshop organised by the lovely people at the Ecosystems Knowledge Network on 'Applying payments for ecosystem services in practice'.
Along with my collague Professor Brett Day from the UEA, we're going to talk to people from wildlife trusts and local councils about the project that we ran last summer down in Cornwall, with South West Water and the Westcountry Rivers Trust.
The aim of our project work was to use an auction approach to pay farmers to do work on their farms that would improve water quality, both for the drinking water and for wildlife. We contacted 150 farmers in the Fowey catchment with a list of 12 capital items they could bid for and 3 farm management practice improvements they could sign up to.
I've written a handy 2-sided plain language note to show people what we did and possibly set the seed for how others could use such an approach - you can download this here http://www.cserge.ac.uk/news-archive/2013/briefing-note-river-fowey-auction
And it's not just in the UK that people are interested in this direct approach - my news alerts this morning brought up this interesting article about China and the question of who should pay for environmental benefits.