Landscape Labelling Approaches to PES : Bundling Services, Products and Stewards
Résumé
Landscape labelling is a new Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) concept that seeks to
combine elements of PES with product certification at a landscape scales. Landscape labelling
proposes that managed rural landscapes which deliver valuable ecosystem services be awarded
a ‘landscape label’, by which products derived from this landscape could be differentiated and
value added, in the global market. A principal objective of landscape labelling is to deliver
benefits to communities, rather than individual landowners, based on the continued delivery
of ecosystem services as evaluated at landscape scales, rather than at the scale of private
landholdings. In so doing, landscape labelling also seeks to overcome some of the existing
challenges to the implementation of PES schemes, including evaluating opportunity costs and
ecosystem service delivery, high transaction costs, difficulties in ensuring conditionality and
limited inclusivity leading to inequitable distribution of benefits. The global export trade in
many agricultural commodities derived from tropical smallholdings (including coffee, cacao and
rubber) offers opportunities for the implementation of landscape labelling that is specifically
targeted to benefit smallholders within a landscape mosaic. As such, landscape labelling
would provide management with incentives to continue to meet the ecosystem service criteria
required for certification. The label, with its associated conditionality criteria, could serve as a
mechanism for securing additional payments for ecosystem services, which, under a landscape
certification scheme, would be delivered to community-based organizations for investment in
community and social projects that would benefit a far wider range of people than is possible
in the current PES model.