Payment for Ecosystem Services: A New Model of Win-Win Cooperation Between Agriculture and the Environment

Investing in Abundance and Security

In March, on the stage of ATT 4 FUN in Taipei, at a designer gathering titled "Beauty Comes from the Practice of Beauty," right after a spring/summer trend hair show by a master colorist and cutter, a whole group of partners from across Taiwan fixed their eyes on the environmental capital they had jointly invested in: on the screen appeared the story of Hetian terraced paddies (Hehe Shuititian) far away in the mountains of Gongliao, along with the farmers who always keep up with spring fashion, and their wild species companions. The brief 20-minute "The Beauty of Cherishing the Land and Loving All Things" was in fact the start of Taiwan's pioneering "Pay for Ecosystem Service" (PES) program, a prototype of a mutual-benefit cooperative linked by terraced paddies and rivers.

So, we began recruiting "conservation partners," to help water sources and river systems of important wetland value have a quasi-fund to get through the transitional stage when institutions and social enterprises are just sprouting. In addition to enabling the public sector's phased subsidies to sustain their momentum, we hope even more to invite environmental rights holders to join in, to speak up, and to invest in and protect our environment: so that chopsticks and hoes can support each other, and our environmental capital can grow the more we consume it.

Why is it called a "partner" (hehuoren)? Because we not only co-operate ("he") with farmers, and not only co-operate with nature, but we also join together to link this close relationship: you and water, you and living things, you and the environment, you and your own future.

We sincerely invite you to join our "conservation partners" if:

• If you live on the northeast coast between Keelung and Fulong, we invite you to invest 100 yuan a month to protect your own clean water source.
• If you know that preserving wild genetic diversity is an important bank for our agriculture, medicine, and many technology industries, we invite you to make a deposit together.
• If you are still struggling over whether to eat larval anchovies (or thinking about how to treat jellyfish?), yet worry that by 2040 fish really will cost more than houses, we invite you to give back to the ocean farming system that Heaven provides, at the freshwater land-end of the lifeline chain.
• If you believe that the environmental wisdom and traditional skills accumulated in every local corner may be the answer database for Taiwan's future coexistence with the environment, we invite you to support its store and update.
• If you believe we need a pure land to share with the aquatic wildlife whose homes are rapidly disappearing, we invite you to first help them keep this shelter base that can flourish anew.
• If you hope Taiwan will have more environmental investments blooming everywhere, so that more people believe we need to care for the environment for our shared future, we invite you to give this starting point a chance, and change through practice.

Then, click "Partner Recruitment Information"