Incentives for biodiversity protection and sustainable use include biodiversity-relevant taxes, fees, levies, tradeable permits, and Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). Through these economic instruments, governments can affect both public and private financing flows for biodiversity. Mobilisation of biodiversity finance through pesticide levies, admission fees to natural parks, hunting and fishing permit fees, and the trade-in energy-saving certificates has gained governmental support and political will, but the mobilisation of private and public finance for PES has lacked lustre.
Lack of academic research, governmental support, and political will have vexed environmental economists. Despite a solid theoretical foundation and the ability to tether investments more directly to outcomes, the debate revolves around the same issues from two decades: monetisation of environmental benefits, lack of additionality (how much environmental service would have been provided without conditional payments), and so on. In this article, I answer whether this is a missed or a lurking opportunity for biodiversity financing in India.
