The conservation of biodiversity and natural resources, from which ecosystem services depend, has become a necessity and has traditionally been pursued by the implementation of different political-economic mechanisms. In biodiversity conservation, the most common strategy is the creation of natural reserves. The creation of the Yellowstone National Park in 1872 in the United States is considered the first national park declared in the world. Prescriptive mechanisms (command and control) are also widely applied to restrict and guide the use of natural resources. However, there are other possible mechanisms to promote conservation that include financial penalties (taxes and tariffs), persuasion (dissemination of information and educational processes), property rights (eg. use of permissions), and payments (subsidies and direct payments). The choice and application of each different political-economic mechanism depend on the type of service that is intended to preserve or promote. Different ecosystem services have fundamentally distinct characteristics that influence in the most appropriate way to treat them economically. It also depends on local conditions in policy implementation.
 
The Conservation Policies and Territorial Planning subproject has the general objective to provide subsidies for the implementation of public policies for land use planning and ecosystem services maintenance in agricultural landscapes in the Atlantic Forest region. It is essentially an integrative proposal of the main results obtained during the development of Project Interface.
 
Currently, research efforts in this sub-project are focused on the study of the effectiveness of the mechanism of Payment for Environmental Services (PES) in promoting biodiversity conservation, native forest, and ecosystem services that these species or areas provide to human well-being.

​​* Pictures have links to detailed descriptions of sub-projects.

Patricia Ruggiero

Jean Paul Metzger

Liz Nichols