Jeannette Gurung has accepted the invitation to serve on the Policy Advisory Committee for The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Project “Incentives for Ecosystem Services in Agriculture”. The objective of the project is to raise awareness of the importance of incentives for ecosystem services provided by agriculture. In the first phase, the project compiled a set of case studies covering various examples of models to incentivise the provision of ecosystem services. These schemes were presented and discussed in a Seminar in September 2013.
Besides conducting the evaluation and analysis of various examples using case studies, the project is planning to support and contribute to a dialogue on policy issues to raise awareness of the importance of incentives for ecosystem services. The objective is to assess the impact of policies on the efficiency and effectiveness as well as the long-term viability of schemes incentivizing the provision of ecosystem services. The policy issues discussed use case studies as evidence and are related to (i) policies enabling the establishment of robust and financially sustainable IES-schemes; (ii) the role and expectations of the private sector in such schemes; (iii) the role and function of governments in such schemes and finally; (iv) discussion of promising models for public-private partnerships.
The role of the members of the Policy Advisory Committee (PAC) is to advise the project on identifying innovative policy-relevant issues, allowing for a supportive and enabling policy framework for ecosystem services provision. This will allow the project to identify promising and coherent policies tackling the trade-off between providing healthy and nutritious food and preserving natural resource endowment while contributing to poverty alleviation, food security and rural development.
Jeannette will be attending the first PAC meeting on 9 to 10 June 2014 in Rome, Italy.