Author: rolfgroeneveld

Why (for the time being) I’m sticking with R

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I’m a big fan of open source software. OK, I know the Dutch have a reputation for being stingy but let’s face it: much of the software we use in economics (Stata, Matlab, Maple) is terribly expensive. So the only time I can use these programs is at the office (which, I admit, should be considered a healthy thing). To be able to work on my laptop when I’m at home (or in a hotel room, or in an airplane, for that matter) I try to work as much as I can with their open source equivalents as much as I can.

One of the programmes I’ve been using is R (a horrible name to Google for by the way), but in a sort of on-and-off way. It is less user-friendly than Matlab, much slower than Matlab, and contains fewer possibilities for statistical analysis than Stata. So I’m still fiddling around with programming languages like C++ (probably even faster than Matlab, but rabidly user-hostile) and Python (more user-friendly than C++, and perhaps as fast as Matlab) for calculations.

Slowly, however, I’m coming round to R, in my teaching as well as in my research, for a number of reasons:

  • Marine biologists use it a lot, and using the same software helps the communication – it also makes it more likely that you can ask a close colleague how this @#%! package works.
  • By the same token: some of my students, i.e. those who have taken marine ecology modelling courses, know it already.
  • I can use it in my environmental valuation classes (statistics) as well as in my resource economics classes (modelling), so that again, some students in one course know it from another course I’m teaching.
  • It seems that R finally has a decent package to do conditional logit and probit (or, as others call it, alternative-specific multinomial logit and probit).

If only they could make it a lot faster, because it is too slow for value function iteration.

Mapping marine economics (4): Fishers are not alone anymore

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One of the major attractions of Scheveningen (if you can pronounce that you’ve successfully adapted to Dutch culture) is a 360 degrees painting by the Dutch painter Hendrik Willem Mesdag. It depicts the North Sea coast near Scheveningen in the nineteenth century, long before its neighbouring city, The Hague, absorbed this coastal fishing village in one big agglomeration. Mesdag created an illusion that worked surprisingly well: there appears to be depth in the painting and you feel like standing on a dune watching over the beach, or looking down on the village with its neat little houses, or the villas where rich city folk spent their free time. What is also striking is the dominance of fishing, together with transport, in the coastal zone. You see some sunbathers, but they are easily outnumbered by fishers and other workers in the fishery, such as the horsemen towing the bomschuiten (flat-bottomed fishing vessels, a bit like the pink).

How different is it nowadays. International trade has mushroomed. We have largely replaced sails and steam engines by combustion engines running on oil and gas, scattering drilling platforms all over the North Sea to get to the stuff. Wind is making a come-back as wind turbines are forming entire forests in the open sea. Meanwhile, fishing has become something to limit rather than promote: in Mesdag’s days the British scientist Thomas Henry Huxley called fishery resources “inexhaustible”, but for numerous stocks we have actually found those limits and are now concerned about crossing them. And we’re not only concerned for edible species, but also for marine life in general: enter marine protected areas.

So many uses, so many users, so little resource
Like the North Sea, many marine and coastal ecosystems have many different uses, many different users, and many different ways to meet the users’ needs. Mangrove forests provide coastal protection, a nursery ground for wild fish, a source of juvenile shrimp for extensive shrimp farming systems, and a fascinating ecosystem to float through for tourists. Likewise, other coastal ecosystems like mudflats and coral reefs provide a variety of goods and services to a variety of users. And none of these biomes are limitless.

Given this variety of uses it is not surprising that policy makers need to make many tradeoffs. How far are we willing to limit fishing for an extra gigawatt of wind energy? How do we trade off port capacity against tourism? Does the income generated by an extra hectare of intensive shrimp aquaculture offset the loss in biodiversity and coastal protection?

All these examples are tradeoffs between uses, but also within one and the same use policy makers have to make difficult choices. What is worse, a small flood every year or a big flood every ten years? How do we rebuild fish stocks if local communities depend so much on fishing that they cannot miss a single year of it?

Note that simply putting a price tag on services may not be enough: the average per hectare value of a mangrove forest may be low when the forest is large, but once we have cut most of it the last few remaining hectares will be much more valuable. Moreover, aggregating monetary values over all stakeholders and over time may give you a single figure (the net present value), but this simplicity obscures problems of poverty and income distribution. So we may need to consider the entire tradeoff.

Tradeoff analyses and bioeconomic modelling
I have done tradeoff analyses of dairy farming and biodiversity conservation in my PhD thesis, and I recently submitted a paper with a former MSc student of ours, Matteo Zavalloni, and fisheries ecologist Paul van Zwieten where we analyze the tradeoff between shrimp aquaculture and mangrove conservation in a coastal area in Viet Nam. Both analyses are spatially explicit, i.e. we analyze not only how much of something can or should be done, but also where. The “where” question is quite important as many uses of marine areas (shipping, fishing, aquaculture) have a spatial dimension.

So this will be one of my major focus points: developing tools to make quantitative tradeoff analyses of coastal and marine ecosystems. I’m very much a bioeconomic modeller. I guess it’s the geek in me: I’ve always been terrible at practical technical stuff (the holes my house’s walls and the crappy paint jobs on my window panes bear witness to that), but I enjoy the patient development of a complicated quantitative model, or an insightful analytical model. I also enjoy the interdisciplinary nature of this work: you need to collaborate intensively with other scientists, mainly ecologists, to do it right.

The Stapel affair: it is worse than we thought

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After Diederik Stapel was caught cooking the scientific books, three committees investigated the extent of the fraud in their universities (Amsterdam, Groningen, Tilburg), and how it was possible that Stapel committed his fraud on such a massive scale. The report came out last week, and I find its content no less than shocking. And then I’m not just referring to what they found Stapel did, or how the universities where he did it never suspected anything. What shocked me most was the conduct of the other researchers. Worse even, many admitted to these practices without the slightest notion they were doing something wrong.

Repeat the experiments until you get the results you want
Suppose your hypothesis says that X leads to Y. You divide your test subjects into two groups: a group that gets the X treatment and a control group that gets no treatment. If your hypothesis is correct the treatment group should show Y more often than the control group. But how can you be sure the difference is not a coincidence? The problem is that you can never be certain of that, so the difference should be so large that a coincidence is very unlikely. Statisticians express this through the ‘P-value’: if your hypothesis is not true, the probability that you get these results is estimated by the P-value. In general scientists are satisfied if this P-value is lower than 5%. Note that this means that if the hypothesis were not true, you still have a 1 in 20 chance of getting results that suggest it is!

So here is the problem. Some of the interviewees in the Stapel investigation argued it is perfectly normal to do several experiments until you find an effect large enough for a P-value lower than 5%. Once you have found such a result, you report the experiment that gave you this result and ignore the other experiments. The problem here is that any difference you find can be due to coincidence. If you do two experiments, you have a chance of about 1 in 10 that at least one of them gives a P-value lower than 5% if the hypothesis is not true; if you do three experiments, the chance is about 1 in 7. This strategy must have given a lot of false positives.

Select the control group you want
No significant difference between the treatment group and the control group in this experiment? No sweat, you still have data on the control group in an experiment you did last year. After all, they are all random groups, aren’t they? So you simply select the control group that gives the difference you were looking for. Another recipe for false positives.

Keep mum about what you did not find
Another variety is that you had three hypotheses you wanted to test, but only two are confirmed (ok, technically hypotheses are not confirmed – you merely reject their negation). So what do you do? You simply pretend that you wanted to test these two all along and ignore the third one.

Select your outliers strategically
Suppose one of your test subjects scores extremely low or high on a variable: this person could be an exception who cannot be compared to the rest of your sample. For instance, somebody scores very high on some performance test, and when you check who it is it turns out that this person has done the test before. This is a good reason to remove this observation from your dataset because you are comparing this person to people who do the test for the first time. However, two things are important here: (1) you should explain that you excluded this observation, and why; and (2) you should do this regardless of its effect on the significance of your results. It turned out that many interviewees (1) did not report such exclusions in their publications; and (2) would only exclude an observation if doing so would make their results ‘confirm’ their hypothesis.

And all this seemed perfectly normal to some
But as I said earlier, the most troubling observation is that the interviewees had no idea that they were doing anything wrong. They said that these practices are perfectly normal in their field – in fact, in one occasion even the anonymous reviewer of an article requested that some results be removed from the article because they did not confirm their hypothesis!

The overall picture emerges of a culture where research is done not to test hypotheses, but to confirm them. Roos Vonk, a Dutch professor who, just before the whole fraud came out, had announced ‘results’ from an experiment with Stapel ‘showing’ that people who eat meat are more likely to show antisocial behaviour, argued on Dutch television that an experiment has “failed” if it does not confirm your hypothesis. It all reeks of a culture where the open-minded view of the curious researcher is traded for narrow-minded tunnel vision.

Don’t get me wrong here: the committee emphasizes (as any scientist should) that their sample was too small and too selective to draw any conclusions about the field of social psychology as a whole. Nevertheless, the fact that the committee observed this among several interviewees is troubling.

But the journals are also to blame, and there we come to a problem which I am sure is present in many fields, including economics. Have a sexy hypothesis? If your research confirms it the reviewers and the editor will crawl purring at your feet. If your research does not confirm it they will call your hypothesis far-fetched, the experimental set-up flawed, and the results boring. It’s the confirmed result that gets all the attention – and that makes for a huge bias in the overall scientific literature.

(Almost) three days of (almost) night

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This is as light as it gets where I was this week:

The location is Tromsø, Norway. I was there the last few days to discuss the effect of climate change on arctic fisheries. Interestingly, this effect is not necessarily negative – for the Norwegians, that is. Stocks like mackerel may move northwards, making more mackerel available to Norwegian fishers at the expense of more southern less northern fleets (like the Dutch). Other effects may be that arctic stocks become more productive, and as stocks get larger they can also be found in places where they weren’t before. So the University of Tromsø gathered together fisheries economists from Norway, Denmark and Iceland (adding a stray Dutch aspiring fisheries economist and a Mexican professor) to discuss what the economic effects may be, where these effects take place, and how economists can analyse these effects.

My highlights from this meeting:

  • Much of the research in this domain is descriptive: what is happening, and what may happen in the future? This concerns issues varying from what fishers do, where they will fish and how intensively, to the willingness of countries to cooperate in fisheries policy when stocks move northwards.
  • Prescriptive research – which routes should be kept open, where should marine protected areas be allocated – is scarce. I was one of the few participants presenting such research, and even that was about Vietnamese mangrove forests (not exactly arctic) and Dutch agri-environment schemes (not exactly marine or arctic). Juan Carlos Seijo had a very nice presentation about where to allocate a marine protected area in an ecosystem where the commercial fish originates from a particular (nursery) area. Not very surprisingly, one should protect the nursery area from fishing, but if you take into account what fishers do the effect of the allocation also depends on whether the nursery lies close to the fishing port or far away from it.
  • Norwegians are delightfully unapologetic about hunting and whaling. I can’t blame them: they have plenty of fish, minke whale and game, and as far as I can see they manage these stocks fairly well. Meanwhile, the Dutch get squeamish about whether we should cull deer (but hunting is cruel), let them starve (which is even crueler), or risk hitting them on the highway (would you like a deer in your windscreen?).
  • All the more surprising that the Dutch hunted whales, seals, and other cuddly arctic fauna on a large scale before the Norwegians did.
  • Norwegian is a very efficient language. “Hello how are you today?” is “hej”; “thank you very much” is “takk”. Why waste energy on redundant syllables?

Tromsø is a fascinating place. After Murmansk it is the largest city above the polar circle, and around this time of the year the sun does not rise – you get some twilight between 10am and 2pm, that’s it. The city is proud of its arctic hunters (like Wanny Woldstad) and explorers (like Roald Amundsen). But I admit I’m glad to have some sunlight again.

Mapping marine economics (3): Why do we overfish?

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Let’s face it: it’s silly. The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that about 30% of global fish stocks could have higher yields if they were fished less intensively. Think about it: spend less fuel, labour and capital on fishing, and catch more fish, not less, as a result – what’s not to like? So why are these stocks overfished?

It’s the diagnostic question: what are the economic drivers of natural resource depletion? In fact, it’s one of the oldest questions in the profession, and the answer is also one of the oldest concepts: the tragedy of the commons. The ecologist Garret Hardin introduced this term in Science in 1968, illustrating it with an example of a pasture commonly owned by several herdsmen. For each herdsman gaining an extra sheep will reap benefits available to that herdsman alone (wool, meat), while the costs are borne by all herdsmen (less grass available for other sheep). The result: too many sheep, too little grass. If the pasture were privately owned by one herdsman, this herdsman would reap all the benefits and suffer all the costs, so he would probably have a smaller herd of sheep than in the commons case.

The argument also applies to the fishery: the benefits of catching one fish go to the fisher catching it, whereas some of the costs (the loss of the offspring this fish could have produced) are borne by all fishers. In fact, fisheries scientists were already aware of this when Hardin published his article. The economist Scott Gordon showed in the Journal of Political Economy in 1954 that an open access fishery will be fished at a much higher rate than optimal.

Note the dates here: the most fundamental insights in this domain were introduced more than 40 years ago. Has nothing happened since? Of course the insights have been refined further, and there is a lot of game theoretic analysis happening that you could interpret as diagnostic research. When do countries cooperate in international fisheries policy – and when don’t they although they should? What is the bargaining position of a single state (say, Mauritania) in establishing the access fee of a long-distance fishing vessel?

But the more intriguing, and growing insight is that many commons, in Hardin’s definition, are actually managed quite well. The political scientist Elinor Ostrom (who sadly passed away this year) has described many examples of common property (water resources, grazing land, and so on) where the single user refrains from increasing his or her individual benefit at the expense of other users. Even worse: there are examples of such resources where the trouble really started when the government intervened, assuming it needed to solve the commons problem!

So what happened here? It seems (and I admit with some embarrassment that it always takes a non-economist to remind economists of this) human behaviour is driven by more than a calculated self-interest. Many common pool resources are shared by people who are friends or relatives of each other, their kids play with the kids of other users, or their older children may marry those of other users. Ostrom’s research showed that many communities of common pool resource users have developed rules of what they consider ‘reasonable’ use. Use more than your fair share, and you will have to explain yourself to your in-laws, your neighbours, and so on. The rules lead to a management that may not be strictly optimal, but it is certainly sustainable, and probably better than the Tragedy described by Hardin. And when governments introduced legislation to govern the use of the resources, this legislation conflicted with the older informal rules, making matters worse rather than better: formal rules have a nasty habit of crowding out informal rules.

So what should marine resource economists do with these new insights? It’s a difficult subject. So far the research into the role of social norms and informal rules has been very descriptive, with very few insights that can be generalized to the majority of cases. I know a few economists who try to understand how these informal rules evolve: surely a society that has developed the wrong informal rules eventually destroys itself. So you can model this evolution in a manner similar to how ecologists apply game theory to the evolution of species. But how much of that research yields insights that we can apply today remains to be seen, and I’m no evolutionary economist.

Therefore, the research I’m doing in this domain will probably remain limited to a few game theoretic analyses. In VECTORS we analyse how fishing treaties between EU member states (and non-EU countries like Norway) may collapse when stocks move northward with their preferred climate zones. (Actually, Adam Walker is doing this with Hans-Peter Weikard.) In BESTTuna we will analyse the bargaining position of Pacific island nations, and their willingness to cooperate in a common tuna fisheries policy. Hopefully this research will tell us more about the possibilities and impossibilities of managing cross-boundary fish resources through international treaties.

Science publishing works in mysterious ways

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Why

  • Is it (according to Web Of Knowledge, that is) “Environment and Development Economics” but “Environmental & Resource Economics”?
  • Do publishers offer fancy templates for LateX files that violate their own journals’ guidelines for authors?
  • Does Web Of Knowledge abbreviate “Resource and Energy Economics” to “Resour Energy Econ”, and “Energy Economics” to “Energ Econ”? (Note the savings in characters in the latter title: six characters! That’ll save the rainforest.)

Indeed, why abbreviate journal titles at all?

Mapping marine economics (2): Economic value of coastal and marine ecosystems

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How bad is our current state of coastal and marine resources?

This question may get you browsing the websites of IUCN, Wetlands International, or other NGOs, looking for data on historical trends in coral reefs, endangered fish species, and so on. But whether and how fast coral reefs disappear is only half the answer to this question. Note that the question asks: how bad is it? So when we know the rate at which coral reefs are disappearing, the next question should be: how bad is it that they are disappearing?

It’s what I call the nasty question: why do you want to protect the environment? The question sounds insulting, criminal even, as it seems to ignore a self-evident fact: surely the environment deserves protecting? But ‘protecting the environment’ can mean many things, ranging from eliminating emissions of substances that cause cancer (good) to saving the smallpox virus from extinction (not so good). I wrote in an earlier post that given the choice between tsetse flies and human beings, my sympathy is with the latter. In other situations, however, the choice is not so clear. Conserving sharks may sound like a laudable goal, but how many lethal shark attacks are we willing to accept? There are many such trade-offs in coastal and marine policy: mangrove conservation versus shrimp farming, wind energy versus fishing, port development versus tourism. We can’t escape making explicit in what ways, and to what extent, ecosystems are important to us.

That does not necessarily mean putting a price tag on everything. If you want to argue that coral reefs are sacred, or that whales have a right to exist, and you can convince a majority of voters in your country of that view, go ahead. I may not agree with you personally (I’m more of a humanist), but professionally I have just as little to say about that as my fiddle teacher can fix my car. However, if we are talking about economic importance – how much do ecosystems contribute to human welfare – then I can give you a number of reasons why conserving coastal and marine ecosystems may be a good idea after all:

And so on. (Edward Barbier has written a very nice overview of the goods and services provided by coastal ecosystems. Best of all, it is free!) What economists do in this kind of issues is estimating how much coral reefs, mangrove forests, marine fisheries systems, and so on, contribute to human welfare – and yes, we try to express that contribution in dollars, euros, or other currency. This is done for two reasons. The most-cited reason is that if we don’t make these estimates, policy makers may assume the economic value of such ecosystems to be zero. Although I see the merit in showing the importance of coastal ecosystems in a way that makes it possible to compare this value to the value of, say, laptop computers or refrigerators, I still see a danger that such ‘raising awareness science’ degrades into advocacy. In my view, the most legitimate reason to express the value of ecosystem goods and services in monetary terms is that big public projects, like development of ports or aquacultural areas, need to be appraised by the best information available. That means that a cost-benefit analysis of such projects should consider not only the costs of building the port and the income generated by using it, but also the effect it will have on, say, the damage suffered when the next tsunami comes along.

A lot of work has been done in this respect, and a lot of work still remains, as Barbier’s article demonstrates. But I’m not going to do it. I have done valuation studies in the past, and occasionally I supervise students doing valuation surveys. But if you want to really make your mark in this domain you need to do nothing else, and I’m too much of a modelling person to focus on surveys and the statistics that go with them.

That’s all I’m going to say about the 100 cod story

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I know, a lot has been said already about the nonsensical story that there is only 100 cod left, but there is one thing I hadn’t even noticed back then. The Telegraph gave its article the following title:

Just 100 cod left in North Sea

Then the subtitle said:

Overfishing has left fewer than 100 adult cod in the North Sea, it was reported.

This is different than “100 cod” – not all are adult. Perhaps the author changed his or her mind as he/she went along writing the article. Perhaps by fewer than 100 adults he/she meant to say something like 98 adults, which leaves 2 juveniles… Nevermind. The caption under the figure in the article said:

Not a single cod aged over 13 was caught in the North Sea last year.

Most cod is mature before the age of six.

This time they don’t even pretend otherwise

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I’m usually not a conspiracy type of guy but googling for images to visualize ‘carbon sink’ I came across this story:

…British artist Chris Drury thought his commentary on the connection between the coal industry and dead trees would merely generate some polite on-campus debate in Cheyenne.
(…)
By day three of construction, the mining industry was accusing the university of ingratitude towards one of its main benefactors – in what some have seen as a veiled threat to cut funding.

I usually detest the lame arguments on both sides of the climate debate (“you’re only a skeptic because you’re paid by the oil industry”, “you’re only a warmist to rake in more research money”), but what to think of these statements?

“They get millions of dollars in royalties from oil, gas and coal to run the university, and then they put up a monument attacking me, demonising the industry,” Marion Loomis, the director of the Wyoming Mining Association, told the Casper Star-Tribune. “I understand academic freedom, and we’re very supportive of it, but it’s still disappointing.”

Then two Republican members of the Wyoming state legislature joined in, calling the work an insult to coal. The subject of university funding also came up.

“While I would never tinker with the University of Wyoming budget – I’m a great supporter of the University of Wyoming – every now and then, you have to use these opportunities to educate some of the folks at the University of Wyoming about where their paychecks come from,” Tom Lubnau, one of the state legislators, told the Gillette News-Record.

I love the sculpture, by the way. More of the artist here.

Yes, sometimes I agree with the critics of PES – but not always

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Richard Conniff puts some question marks over PES in this piece. Most of it draws from an earlier article by Kent Redford in Conservation Biology, so let me go over the arguments laid out (rephrased in my own words – hoping I get it right) in this article. Be prepared: I actually agree with most of it, although I wholeheartedly disagree with some of it.

PES risks crowding out moral justifications for conservation
This is a risk. The risk is similar to the risk associated with social cost-benefit analysis, namely that the difference between monetised costs and benefits will become the only decision criterion so that non-economic arguments lose their voice in the political debate. This was the case when the USA (under Reagan) adopted its notorious Executive Order 12291, which stated that “Regulatory action shall not be undertaken unless the potential benefits to society for the regulation outweigh the potential costs to society.” No wonder this put a stop to a lot of environmental policy, the benefits of which are most difficult to quantify. So yes, we should keep reminding our students, including economics students, that money is not the only argument in public decisions.

Pro-PES conservationists wrongly believe that all ecosystem services are good
Let me add to that: they even believe ecosystem services are good enough, i.e. good enough to justify conservation. But ecosystem services might not be good enough, and in that sense pro-PES conservationists should be careful what they wish for. But there the article makes an interesting statement (and now I do quote):

Nevertheless, not all ecosystem processes sustain and fulfill human life. Processes such as fire, drought, disease, or flood work against this goal, yet they are vital for ecosystem function, structuring landscapes, and providing vital services and regulatory functions to nonhumans. There is a danger that an economically driven focus on those “services” that are valuable to humans in their nature, scope, and timing may lead to calls to “regulate” ecosystem services to times and in flows that match human needs.

I would like to see Mr Redford explain to Zimbabwean farmers why they should learn to live with themselves, their children, and their cattle getting sick or even dying from sleeping sickness. I’m sure tse tse flies are valuable for some reptile species I should have heard of, but in this case my sympathy is with Homo Sapiens.

Some services may be better provided by species with nasty side-effects
Of course you should take into account nasty side effects, and then the outcome may be that you should still, or should not, use that exotic turbo species to provide the service. Indeed, you may not know the side effects, so precaution is mostly warranted in such cases.

PES may become an incentive to engineer ecosystems towards service provision, which may have nasty side effects
See above. Engineering an ecosystem towards provision of a single service can indeed increase the ecosystem’s brittleness, like monoculture is efficient on the short term but very vulnerable to disease on the long term.

The methods currently used to establish monetary value are problematic
Tell me about it: the economic literature is rife with reasons why putting a price tag on nature can go wrong. But here is another interesting quote from the article:

Where markets do exist, the value of the services from different ecosystems will not reflect their diversity, but their desirability to human consumers.

Now we get to the hidden assumption made by a lot of biologists: ecosystem value = ecosystem diversity. This is a gap between biology and not just economics, but all of social science: social scientists argue that ‘value’ is, well, a value judgement – something that cannot be established objectively, period. Conservationists like to say we should preserve nature because it has ‘intrinsic value’, but what they should really be saying is that they think, or feel, or find that nature has intrinsic value. I hate to say this, but nature having intrinsic value is not a fact; it’s an opinion. A very valid opinion, but there are many others in this whole conservation debate and the way it is being pushed by conservationists smacks of a dictatorial sort of self-righteousness.

PES can have terrible repercussions for (mostly poor) locals
Absolutely. One of the driving forces of deforestation is that nobody knows who owns the forest: is it the state, is it the logging company, or is it the native tribe living in it? Assign any of these three the property rights over the forest and this new rightful owner has the right to exclude all the others. And he will do so, especially when there is money to made! The new allocation may be efficient according to our economics textbooks but it may come at the price of unimaginable social disruption in the lives of local communities.

Property rights may not be able to deal with climate impacts
The argument is like this: if you assign property rights over some species to some owner, this owner may have a strong incentive to stop the species from wandering off when its climate zone starts shifting. Of course, in a well-working market, this owner would be better off buying land elsewhere to let his species neatly follow the change in climate zones, blah blah blah. But land markets are notorious for their institutional problems. Land use regulations, spatial externalities, transaction costs, and all kinds of other problems will throw sand in the machine. This is an interesting issue I hadn’t thought of before. It reflects an interaction between institutional-economic problems and ecological dynamics I might want to look deeper into.

One on the house: paying people not to do nasty stuff
I didn’t find the argument in the article, nor in Conniff’s piece, but it is a problem: a lot of PES is actually paying people not to be nasty. For instance, Conniff gives an example of Vittel-Nestlé paying farmers to not pollute the environment. But pollution is a negative externality: it is a cost imposed by farmers on Vittel. Paying farmers to stop polluting may solve Vittel’s problems on the short term, but it still artificially boosts the farming sector to a size bigger than optimal. The whole world might be better off with farmers doing their business in places where they do less damage, but this solution will actually draw farmers to this area: they get paid not to pollute, what more do you want?

PES is a neoliberal sellout of our democracy to big business
Of course I save the best for last: it is the remark made by the man I would love to see in a cage fight with James Delingpole. Of course I am talking about George Monbiot:

When governments and PES proponents talk about employing marketplace solutions instead of traditional regulatory approaches, [Monbiot] says, “what they are really talking about is shrinking democracy, shrinking public involvement in decision making, shrinking transparency and accountability. By handing it over to the market you are in effect handing it over to corporations and the very rich,” and to “a very plutocratic” decision-making process.

There you have it: more market inevitably means less democracy. Of course, everybody knows you can only have a fully functional democracy under socialism, isn’t it?