Welcome!

The Nature Conservancy (TNC), together with EcoDecisión and Forest Trends, designed the following survey to (1) get a better understanding of the range of costs and the average costs faced by watershed conservation programs, including all costs from the initial feasibility scoping phase through to implementation and operation; and (2) get a better understanding of the key drivers of costs through analyses of program characteristics and costs.

Because these watershed conservation programs often provide some form of compensation to participating landowners, they are generally referred to as “Payment for Watershed Services” (PWS) programs or "Investment in Watershed Services" (IWS) programs, where payments can be either cash or in-kind livelihood-enhancing goods or services provided to individuals or communities. In some cases, programs only provide materials to landowners such as fencing posts or wire or seedlings. In this survey, we include all those programs and refer to all of them as “PWS programs” or simply “programs”.

This research effort will yield two key outcomes:
  1. It will enhance our ability to realistically plan for PWS programs’ financing needs
  2. It will represent a massive advance on the current state of knowledge about the costs of PWS programs, by explicitly capturing the transaction costs which usually are ignored or very incompletely captured in existing economic analysis of PWS programs, but which, based on our experience, make up a large part of total program costs.

The survey has two components:
  1. this Survey Monkey questionnaire that asks about the characteristics of the program. These are based on our understanding of important aspects that drive program costs, from our experience and the relevant literature.
  2. An Excel spreadsheet that asks you to enter annual costs for specific program activities. You will find the link to the Excel at the end of this questionnaire as well as here. We ask you to use actual costs for past years, and projected costs for future years. This allows us to separate actual and projected costs. Please find detailed instructions for this Excel at the end of the questionnaire. The spreadsheet will automatically generate a 20-year cashflow figure to help visualize your program spending, which can be useful for planning and as a communication tool.

Your input will allow us to conduct analyses to test the relationships between program attributes and program costs, and hence improve our understanding of shortfalls in watershed conservation investments and our ability to realistically plan for programs’ financing needs. We will schedule webinars and debriefs to share the results and learning with you in early 2020. Your support will be recognized and acknowledged in any future academic publications. We also offer co-authorship opportunities if you're interested in getting deeper involved in this study.

Please note that in this survey (online questionnaire + Excel spreadsheet), we are seeking information about the characteristics of the program and the activities carried out by the program overall (and all the institutions involved in the management of the program), not just about the institution you belong to.

Please complete this survey by Oct 31, 2019.
 
Thank you so much for your time and participation. We hope you find this survey useful!
 
Sincerely,
PWS Cost Study team
 
 5% of survey complete.

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