ABSTRACT
Coastal areas are among the most productive, enjoyable and fascinating locations on our planet. However, they are also a very fragile portion of the ecosystemhuman interface, and even more fragile than ever given that ecosystem functions, such as climate regulation and the water cycle, have become more unpredictable. This is indeed a critical global issue, not only for those countries with long or short coastlines, but also for land-locked countries, because of the unique landscape function of coastal areas and the incompleteness of watershed management regimes at present. On the one hand, coastal areas merge both fresh and saline waters and form a unique and crucial ‘switch’ in the ecosystem functions which regulate and support (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005) both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Such ecosystem functions deliver a significant portion of the ecosystem services that link mountains with oceans (California Department of Water Resources, 2009), while making connections with our societies. On the other hand, the management of coastal areas is generally isolated from that of their upstream areas, including mountains, lakes and rivers, which are often targeted as independent management domains. More specifically, current watershed management regimes have not integrated hydrological orders (from mountain streams, through lakes, rivers and coastal areas, to oceans) with legislative tiers (from provinces, through municipalities, to towns). Notwithstanding, recent evidence from the watershed-based Payments for
Ecosystem Services (PES) programmes, or the Payments for Watershed Services (PWS) programmes, reveals a promising direction of developing organizing boundaries to integrate hydrological orders with legislative tiers (Lin et al., 2013). Organizing boundaries refer to the financial partnerships (Figure 5.1) formed by organizing intermediaries, downstream payers and upstream payees for watershed management. Indeed, 13 advanced, small-scale PES programmes implemented in 13 developing countries have all demonstrated that upstream and downstream participants were not constrained to specific hydrological or legislative units. Rather, the PES participants resided in watershed sections confined by two adjacent hydrological orders ranging from the first order (i.e., mainstream) to the seventh order of respective watersheds, and they belonged to diverse legislative
units located in the third to the sixth legislative tiers of respective country systems (Lin et al., 2013). The PES partnerships create an institutional rationale for directing economic
incentives to generate conservation services by land users (Lin and Ueta, 2012). These conservation services enhance ecosystem functions in delivering specific ecosystem services at known locations within a watershed. Focusing on water governance as an institutional change for organizing waters on the basis of the ecosystem-human interface, the PES approach illuminates a path for developing a methodology for integrated water governance. Integrated water governance refers to a coordinated system among integrated water resources governance, integrated watershed governance and integrated aquatic ecosystem governance (Lin, 2012). This chapter explores an integrative decision mechanism for improving ecosys-
tem functions by connecting coastal areas with their upstream basins. It seeks to draw the attention of innovators, conservationists, visionaries and investors to developing a long-term strategy for sustaining coastal areas. To generalize the institutional rationale of PES partnerships at the watershed scale, this chapter first identifies the essential economic reasons and governance dimensions underpinning the PES partnerships. Then an Integrated Payments for Ecosystem Services (IPES) framework is proposed as an integrative decision mechanism for integrated water governance. A Chinese PES programme is used to illustrate the IPES mechanism. Further, the policy implications of the IPES mechanism for coastal and marine ecosystem governance are discussed.
