ETH-Z

This collaboration with Dr. Robert Huber at ETH-Z has emerged out of his rich experience with collective agri-environmental schemes in Switzerland, and interest to find novel ways to understand them.

In this work, we hope to understand whether (and how) developing dynamic structures for payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs can offer things that static programs can't.

We know that paying people for actions they take on the land puts risk on the buyer, because the ecosystem service might never emerge. We also know that paying for outcomes puts the risk on the provider, because the efforts they take might not lead to service outcomes - or at least, not that can be observed and attributed to them.

What we know less about is how those action and outcome-based payments provide different opportunities for innovation and discovery, and how their integration over time could lead to system transformation.

This collaboration will apply a similar workflow to that being developed in the HWC Working Group - a co-designed game for payments in Swiss agriculture, with an automated workflow to a scaled up ABM of payment design and socio-environmental outcomes. We hope to identify the ways in which (for example) early action-based payments enable discovery and innovation that can lead to system transformations under outcomes-based payments later.