Cascading Impacts of Payments for Ecosystem Services in Complex Human-Environment Systems

The theory and practice associated with payments for ecosystem services (PES) feature a variety of piecemeal studies related to impacts of socioeconomic, demographic, and environmental variables, lacking efforts in understanding their mutual relationships in a spatially and temporally explicit manner. In addition, PES literature is short of ecological metrics that document the consequences of PES other than land use and land cover and its change. Building on detailed survey data from Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve (FNNR), China, we developed and tested an agent-based model to study the complex interactions among human livelihoods (migration and resource extraction in particular), PES, and the Guizhou golden monkey habitat occupancy over 20 years. We then performed simulation-based experiments testing social and ecological impacts of PES payments as well as human population pressures. The results show that with a steady increase in outmigration, the number of land parcels enrolled in one of China’s major PES programs tends to increase, reach a peak, and then slowly decline, showing a convex trend that converges to a stable number of enrolled parcels regardless of payment levels. Simulated monkey occupancy responds to changes in PES payment levels substantially in edge areas of FNNR. Our model is not only useful for FNNR, but also applicable as a platform to study and further understand human and ecological roles of PES in many other complex human-environment systems, shedding light into key elements, interactions, or relationships in the systems that PES researchers and practitioners should bear in mind. Our research contributes to establishing a scientific basis of PES science that incorporates features in complex systems, offering more realistic, spatially and temporally explicit insights related to PES policy or related interventions.