Payments for environmental services (PES) have gained wide popularity as an approach to promote environmentally friendly land use or agricultural production practices. Yet academics have also voiced caveats against seeing PES as a panacea. This article discusses whether PES is an appropriate and...

The decision of whether to retain forest or convert to another land use is affected by uncertainty over future land-use returns. This paper examines the design of conservation payments to landowners under uncertainty. Payments are indexed to the returns from forest conversion (agriculture), or...