Evaluation tools for environmental services in the conservation land of Mexico City

Abstract

Environmental services are benefits that humans obtain from ecosystems. Currently, there are various public policy instruments to conserve them. However, there are very few established, standardized, and proven techniques and tools that allow evaluating the results of these efforts. In Mexico City (CDMX), environmental programs grant economic compensation to landowners for the conservation and maintenance of environmental services. It is essential to establish mechanisms and tools that allow the evaluation of these programs through participatory monitoring. This study reports the experience of designing tools to monitor three environmental services (water infiltration, carbon storage, biodiversity). We designed the techniques using unspecialized material, easily accessible and highly reliable and tested with beneficiaries and officials of a CDMX environmental program. This exercise allowed knowing the challenges and providing recommendations to improve these evaluations, with the objective of their future implementation, to evaluate environmental programs and empower local actors with more information about their ecosystems and the benefits they generate.