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The purpose of the study is to review available economic methods for the incorporation of urban green belts and water spaces into the city development control system. The paper aims to identify economic subjects of analysis, provide a definition of approaches, and methods for ensuring the rendering of decisions in a monetized form, and outline the main directions of work for creating the legal and methodological frameworks for the formation of urban green belts. The findings indicate that the valuation treatment of urban green water belts requires them to be split into tangible and intangible asset components, with the valuation of the former amenable under the cost approach, and the valuation of the latter requiring the application of sociological (contingent) and regression-based valuation methods. We conclude with suggestions on how valuation estimates obtainable for such assets can be used in the context of urban zoning and financial municipal administration decisions.

The rivers and streams serve as important life support systems for helping in recharging the aquifers and regulating the hydrological cycle besides providing habitats and breading grounds for birds, fish and aquatic life. However, these are always becoming targets of adverse effects of development around the streams particularly in urban areas due to presence of human activities like urbanization and climate change. As a result of these activities, most of the urban streams have got degraded due to encroachment, siltation discharge of domestic sewage, surface drainage caring sand and silt and other chemical pollutants. Literature review is conducted to study how resilience and ecosystem services can play important role in climate change adaptation and to keep balance between nature and society. This review paper is to analyse the Green Infrastructure (GI) and the recent Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI) are the multidisciplinary approaches to combat the negative impact of urbanization and climate change on urban streams and revive the condition totally. Identification of the need of development of Blue-Green infrastructure framework to transform nallahs (dirty drains) to nadis(Streams) in India.

Payments for Environmental Services (PES) are part of a global context in which the market economy can no longer ignore nature’s resources and how it is used, having to consider it as one of its components, so that human beings can exercise their activities in a way that is not harmful to the ecosystems. In this sense, it is essential to incentive practices that strengthen conservative attitudes. To consider the actual PES, we have to check a number of factors, such as: transaction costs and opportunity, the effects of permanence, leakage and additionality; which this paper sought to apply by analyzing six PES programs aiming the conservation of water resources in Southern Brazil. The observed patterns were: the difficulty in dealing with transaction costs and opportunity as well as the effect caused by the lack of permanence. However, PES programs encouraged environmental services supply owners to change their behavior, therefore encouraging water conservation. Thus, possible PES programs to be implemented in Banhado Grande’s EPA (Environmental Protection Area) are a way to promote the conservation of wetlands — that provide important ecosystem services, in order to minimize conflict between environment and human activities, such as rice growing.

Introduction. Multiple environmental and socio-economic indicators show that our current agriculture and the organization of the food system need to be revised. Agroecology has been proposed as a promising concept for achieving greater sustainability. This paper offers an overview and discussion of the concept based on existing literature and case studies, and explores the way it questions our current research approaches and education paradigms. Literature. In order to improve the sustainability of agriculture, the use of external and chemical inputs needs to be minimized. Agroecological farming practices seek to optimize ecological processes, thus minimizing the need for external inputs by providing an array of ecosystem services. Implementing such practices challenges the current structure of the food system, which has been criticized for its lack of social relevance and economic viability. An agroecological approach includes all stakeholders, from field to fork, in the discussion, design and development of future food systems. This inclusion of various disciplines and stakeholders raises issues about scientists and their research practices, as well as about the education of the next generation of scientists. Conclusions. Agroecology is based on the concept that agricultural practices and food systems cannot be dissociated because they belong to the same natural and socio-economic context. Clearly, agroecology is not a silver-bullet, but its principles can serve as avenues for rethinking the current approaches towards achieving greater sustainability. Adapting research approaches in line with indicators that promote inter- and transdisciplinary research is essential if progress is to be made.

The concept of ecosystem services – benefits supplied to human societies by ecosystems- is a fast spreading concept, both in scientific and political arenas. Because of this success, this concept is more and more used as a robust and stabilised concept, with a lack of recognition of the high uncertainties associated with it. This paper first highlights the scientific uncertainties concerning the socio-ecological dynamics of production of services. In many cases, scientific have no certainties about the cause-effect relationships between the state of an ecosystem and the effective production of a service, either because of a lack of knowledge on these relationships, either because the complex systems under study are by their nature unpredictable. The paper also underlines the importance of societal uncertainties associated with ecosystem services, due to the existence of diverse and sometimes contradictory perceptions among stakeholders, about the concept of service and the framing of human-nature relationships, and about the governance devices and tools using this concept, such as payments for environmental services. Based on a literature review, this papers shows that several communities of researchers take scientific uncertainties into account, but very few deal with societal uncertainties. We emphasize the need to develop methods aimed at confronting and integrating the diversity of stakeholders’ perceptions, interests and knowledge about ecosystem services and their dynamics, seeing trade-offs among ecosystem services as explicit collective and concerted choices.

Carbon credits issued from the Clean Development Mechanism forest projects generally belong to project investors. Nevertheless, such an issue remains highly conflicting when dealing with REDD+. Voices arise against the risk of investors capturing much of the expected benefits from REDD+ projects. In the present paper we argue that this may not be the right issue to be tackled. Although both the REDD+ governance architecture and its funding mechanisms are still to be decided, we argue that this risk may be valid only in the case of carbon credits issued from projects. We also argue that this risk will also depend on the economic model behind REDD+ projects. If projects adopt an approach of being paid for the provision of environmental services, paying legal or traditional forest owners for conserving forest carbon stocks makes sense. This approach can be described as a “conservation rent”, and has been highly criticized by economists for undermining effectiveness. Another approach would be to get paid for an “active contribution” to a particular environmental objective. In this case, we argue that a specific right arises from this activity, different from the rights over the resource. Here, carbon property rights can be invoked to share the carbon rent, if any. In the end, to clarify the debate around carbon rights amounts to distinguish benefits from rent.

Urban green spaces, considered as a “green showcase”, have been the topic of numerous scientific researches during the past 20 years, investigating not only its socio-urban values but also its ecological ones (Clergeau, 2012). Nowadays, some new concepts are associated to urban green spaces, such as the “multifunctionality” and “ecosystem services” concepts (Bastian et al., 2011). However, the lack of terminological consensus of these concepts limits their use and their integration in the decision-making processes. Based on a literature review, this paper aims to investigate how the scientific community takes into account these concepts. Moreover, we discuss the current conceptual framework in order to highlight some wording imprecision. Finally, we provide further guidance for the creation of future urban greenway.

The article deals with the role of environmental organizations in the rapid spread of the concept of ecosystem services in France. From four of them: International Union for Conservation of Nature, France Nature Environnement, Fondation Nicolas Hulot and World Wildlife Fund, the survey first shows how sharing out the tasks between environmental organizations has made faster and easier the spread of the systemic approach promoted by the ecosystem services. At the interface between science, firms and policy-making, environmental NGOs seem to have been key players in the dissemination of the concept. The paper examines how the concept allows them to renew their approaches and their activism and how it offers new opportunities. It finally focuses on the role played by NGOs in agricultural issues.

Since the mid-1990s, the concept of ecosystem services has been growing in popularity at academic and operational level. The aim of this paper is to analyse the different meanings of these concepts in economic science. In this context, it is important to explain the origin of the notion of ecosystem services in order to put forward a typology that treats them as externalities, or as provision of services, or as services included in a product subject to a market transaction. On the basis of our typology, we develop a critical analysis on various regulating instruments for these services.

The wide use of the concept of « Ecosystem services (ES) » imposes a cautious work for delimiting its scope, particularly regarding its effects on nature’s management strategies. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the advantages and limits of the concept when used as framework for hydrosystem management. Within a Foucauldian theoretical framework, and through the study of ES genealogy and the process of its diffusion, we show how ES is transforming from a metaphorical compromise among scientist looking to plead with policy makers for nature’s conservation, to a dispositive. This limits greatly its scope: created to convince mainly international governance actors playing at a global scale, the ES concept does not necessarily have a universal range of action. By analyzing cases on watershed management, we identify at least three uses of the concept: as a tool for raising global awareness; as a mean to foster democratic dialogue facilitator and to support decision; and as a justification for financial nature’s management and/or restoration actions. To date, the actual contribution of the concept is limited and its potential contribution is constrained by technical reasons including the difficulty for evaluating services provided by river ecosystems. Although the educational dimension of the ES concept seems relevant, its usefulness concerning its quantitative characterization and economic valuation needs further discussion.

Public policies have known a new managerial approach growth promoted by the cognitive and practice framework of New Public Management. This development has empowered the institutionalization of efficiency and effectiveness indicators in public sector’s practices. In fact, it seems that ecosystem services and payments for environmental services register in this new philosophy. Drawing on this, this paper proposes to consider the production’s conditions of tools and monetary evaluation procedures in environmental policies. Finally, the article argues that this procedures contains and disseminate a reduction point of view about the biodiversity value.

This paper questions the relevance of the concept of “services provided by biodiversity”. The discourse of key actors practitioners of biodiversity has been studied.This research investigates the relevance of this notion through the actors’ principles of justification (assumed as plural) as well as its consequences on the biodiversity management. By using French convention theory, different justification polities and worlds of action of actors concerned by biodiversity have been highlighted. The analysis of interviews conducted with actors of the Nord-Pas de Calais Region (firms, associations, and biodiversity managers) in strong link (and sometimes less intense link) with biodiversity shows that the human-nature relationships appears as entering into three categories (Human as dominant, Nature as dominant and integration between Human and Nature).The perception of Nature depends on the scale of analysis, within which Nature is perceived as an object or a system. Given these differentiated perceptions, biodiversity protection policies must be based on appropriate instruments.The notion of Payments for Environmental Services (PES), which often refers to bilateral relationships and market-based instruments appears as limited and inappropriate to stakeholders' expectations at the local level.

Despite the growing interest they arouse, market instruments, such as payments for ecosystem services (PES), are still far from being the dominant political strategies in the conservation of biodiversity and protection of the environment, in Quebec as elsewhere. Even though the PES have received greater consideration in recent years, the field of legal studies regarding this question has hardly progressed. Within this context, the aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it aims to provide an overview of the different political systems incorporating the concept of ES in Quebec and to identify the role it occupies within these arrangements. Secondly, it also aims to consider more specifically how PES Programs implemented in the agricultural sector of Quebec can help improve existing political arrangements in this sector.

This paper shows the importance of developing an ecosystem services framework in line with the concept of environmental capital within an operational context of territorial development. A perception study was done in 2014 where 95 local stakeholders in the Karaburun Peninsula were surveyed: farmers, tradesmen, tourists, residents, associations, cooperatives, and municipality. It allows linking the notion of environmental capital to territorial development by identifying the ecosystem services of the peninsula and their potential impact on well-being.

The purpose of this paper is to question the meaning of the ecosystem services (ES) approach and its usefulness for regional natural parks. The field work realized in the Park Scarpe-Escaut includes: an observational experience in a research project aiming at valuing several ES on the territory, 10 semi-directive interviews and the analysis of the park’s management documents. The study concludes that ES have important limits, whether they are considered as decision-aid tools or as communicational tools. The case of the park Scarpe-Escaut is interesting because it challenges the belief in the efficacy of ES and monetary arguments for biodiversity protection, spread by the new environmental pragmatists.

Nature in the city is a significant asset for cities’ adaptation to climate change and contributes to the quality of life of people in many ways. Its contribution, predominantly positive but also negative, can be represented by ecosystem services and disservices. In this paper, we question the input of consideration, mapping and communication on ES in creating a common language among stakeholders with different background and practices, and to make nature more visible in urban planning decisions. The question is addressed qualitatively through stakeholders’ interviews. The results show the potential added value of se as a tool for acculturation, territorial dialogue and evaluation in favour of the conservation and development of nature in the city.