Life Sciences Commons^™

Integrating Wildlife Conservation Into Ecosystem Service Payments And Carbon Offsets: A Case Study From Costa Rica, Jared D. Wolfe, Pablo Elizondo

Michigan Tech Publications

Wildlife conservation is challenged by the expensive and cost prohibitive strategy of directly purchasing land to protect habitat at the landscape scale. An alternative mechanism used to protect habitat includes payments for ecosystem‐services (PES), where farmers and landowners are paid to manage their lands for a particular ecological service. Some of these easements are used to conserve a diversity of resources (i.e., water, soil, nutrient cycling, and biodiversity); however, the largest PES easement programs focus on carbon sequestration and are sold on international carbon markets as offsets. Here, we demonstrate that successfully protecting vulnerable habitat for wildlife can be achieved …