New ICTA-UAB projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science

Two ICTA-UAB projects will receive funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation in the framework of the call «R&D Projects» in the modalities «Research Challenges» and «Knowledge Generation». 

The selected projects are PES-EMOTIVE, focused on payments for ecosystem services, is co-led by Esteve Corbera and Sergio Villamayor-Tomás, and the project OPAL, led by Jordi García Orellana, will tackle the major pathways delivering nutrients, trace metals and pollutants originated from anthropogenic activities to coastal Mediterranean lagoons.

The Project “Payments for Ecosystem Services: long-term Effectiveness and Motivations for the conservation of forest Ecosystems” (PES-EMOTIVE) is based on the assumption that global biodiversity loss and climate change mitigation are two of the greatest environmental challenges of our time. 

To partially address such challenges, Payments for Ecosystem or Environmental Services (PES) programs have disbursed billions of dollars of funding to rural communities and landowners in tropical and sub-tropical countries, conditional on the voluntary conservation of standing forests as a means of protecting biodiversity and reducing emissions from land-use change. As of today, there are still very few analyses of the effectiveness of such programs, which compare similar neighboring forests with and without PES and control for contextual variables. These studies have examined the conservation of changes in forest cover over a short period of time and they have not accounted for people’s motivations for forest conservation and for local institutions as key factors that contribute to enhanced or reduced conservation, particularly when payments end.

PES-EMOTIVE aims to fill these gaps by analyzing how permanent the effects of PES programs on forest cover are in the long term and by exploring how PES participants’ motivations and local institutional contexts evolve and influence such effects. The project will be carried out in two regions of Mexico and Colombia, which host long-standing PES programs but have differing institutional contexts. We will adopt a multi-disciplinary approach that integrates quantitative land-use system science and social science methods.

We hope to advance environmental and conservation science by, first, shedding light on the effectiveness of the studied PES programs; second, revealing the linkages and interactions between forest cover, motivations and the broader institutional context; and, finally, generating a database of people’s motivations to conserve forests at family-household level, which can will be used as a baseline for future research.

The project is co-led by Esteve Corbera and Sergio Villamayor-Tomás (ICTA-UAB), Lina Moros (Universidad de los Andes) and Santiago Izquierdo-Tort  (Université du Québec en Outaouais)

OPAL project led by Jordin García Orellana

The project “Pathways delivering solutes into coastal lagoons: overlooked drivers of ecosystem degradation” (OPAL) proceeds from the fact that coastal lagoons are habitats with high biological productivity, supporting rich and abundant ecosystems and providing goods and services for coastal communities.

However, the increased human stress on lagoonal resources has negatively impacted these ecosystems. Wellknown consequences of anthropogenic pressures on coastal lagoons include increased inputs of nutrients and pollutants, which are mainly originated from untreated domestic or industrial sewage and/or the use of fertilizers for agriculture in the surrounding watershed. However, the mechanisms transporting solutes originated form anthropogenic activities to lagoon waters are not appropriately understood or overlooked. The objective of OPAL is to understand the major pathways delivering nutrients, trace metals and pollutants originated from anthropogenic activities to coastal Mediterranean lagoons connected to intensively used aquifers, and their consequences on the lagoon geochemical cycles.

The project will be developed in the Mar Menor and will pay special attention on the understanding of the origin of solutes (agriculture, urbanism, tourism and mining wastes), the role of major pathways (groundwater, sediments, streams and atmosphere) transferring these compounds to coastal lagoons and their response to episodic events. OPAL proposes a multidisciplinary approach that combines the application of radioactive and stable tracers, modelling approaches, microbiological assessments and geophysical methods.

The project will be organized in two subprojects: 1) PATHWAYS focused on the transfer of solutes to the lagoon and their potential implications; 2) INPUT focused on the identification of solute sources to the coastal aquifer and the water transport mechanisms and geochemical transformations occurring therein.