Exploring the Contribution of Fiscal Transfers to Protected Area Policy

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Biodiversity payments have become an increasingly proposed tool to promote conservation measures. An unexplored issue concerns the potential role of fiscal transfers between the state and infra-national authorities potentially as direct financial incentives for biodiversity conservation. We explore how protected areas can be taken into account in a redistributive fiscal transfer system between the state and local authorities, i.e., municipalities. Different simulations were made in the Mediterranean region of southern France, a major biodiversity hotspot subject to increasing threats. We examined two methods for fiscal transfer: first, a "per hectare" method, based on the surface of the protected area within the boundaries of the municipality and second a "population equivalent" method, in which we convert the surface of protected areas into relative numbers of inhabitants. Our results show that consideration of the population of the municipality in addition to its protected areas' surface can provide a strong incentive to encourage municipalities to designate protected areas. However, this will require increased public funding to buffer financial losses incurred by large municipalities that have a low proportion of their territory within protected areas. We discuss the social feasibility of this tool for green infrastructure implementation and future protected area designation.

History and perspectives of payment for nature use in the Russian Federation

“…История применения норматив-но-правовых рычагов воздействия на причинителей экологического ущерба в XX в. показала их неэффективность с точки зрения стимулирования инноваци-онного развития природопользования, поэтому уже с начала 1970-х годов стра-нами Европейского Союза начали при-меняться экономические инструменты регулирования [4,10,11,12]. В том чис-ле стали вводится природно-ресурсные и экологические налоги: энергетические, за использование природных ресурсов (роялти), за размещение твердых отхо-дов, загрязнение окружающей среды химическими веществами и физически-ми факторами (например, налог на шум).…”

“…Обзор научных публикаций по изучаемой те-матике [1,5,6] показал, что в качестве решения проблемы учеными предлага-ются такие меры как применение новых алгоритмов оценки объемов сбросов и выбросов вредных веществ в окружаю-щую среду; внедрение новых методов определения региональных удельных нормативов платы за загрязнение и раз-мещение отходов; введение дополни-тельных налогов за размещение особо опасных веществ или веществ, оказы-вающих глобальное экологическое влия-ние (например, хлора в воде, озонораз-рушающих и парниковых газов в атмо-сфере по опыту европейских стран -Финляндии, Швеции, Нидерландах, Норвегии [10,11] и др., которые ввели эти налоги в начале 90-х гг. ХХ в.…”

Integrating Ecological Indicators into Federal‐State Fiscal Relations: A policy design study for Germany

“…There is a trade‐off between the (ecological) accuracy of an indicator and the rather low level of complexity required to calculate transfers based on continually available data (Schröter‐Schlaack et al , ). Hence, all existing EFT schemes in Brazil, Portugal and, to some extent, France use the coverage and category of PA as their main ecological indicator (Borie et al , ; Grieg‐Gran, ; Loureiro, ; May et al , ; Ring, ; Santos et al , ; Sauquet et al , ; Schröter‐Schlaack et al , ). This compensates the hosting administration for the costs incurred and creates incentives for designating additional PA (Sauquet et al , ; Droste et al , ).…”

Municipal Responses to Ecological Fiscal Transfers in Brazil: A microeconometric panel data approach

“…Portugal established a municipal EFT scheme in 2007 (Santos et al , ). In France, there are compensation schemes for municipalities in core areas of national parks (Borie et al , ). In Queensland, Australia, a multi‐criteria analysis has been used for the allocation of environmental funds via fiscal transfers (Hajkowicz, ).…”