Incentives for Ecosystem Services (IES) in the Himalayas: A ‘Cookbook’ for Emerging IES Practitioners in the Region

This step is crucial to creating sustainable, resilient IES systems that have enduring impacts. Actions that are taken to identify, rectify or resolve unintended consequences can be crucial to building trust in host communities, and when conflicts around IES arise, they must be quickly neutralized and addressed. Regular consultation and community participation in the improvement process itself to generate solutions can often go a long way to rebuilding goodwill. Step 10. Improving

Far from being a one-off action, the IES system must respond to adaptive management, and improve over time. Participation from all counterparts and also newly identified, peripheral or marginalized stakeholders is an

important part of the improvement process. Furthermore, benefit sharing with other interested parties, watersheds, communities, and governance forums is a crucial component in IES experimentation and learning.

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Step 10: Improving • Address unintended consequences, seek additional input • Share learnings from cases • Scale up action, expand or include more participation

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Incentives for Ecosystem Services (IES) in the Himalayas