Abstract
Payments for Environmental Services (PES) are widely used incentive-altering mechanisms for influencing human activities to achieve environmental goals. They influence the payment matrix on environment-related activities by offsetting incurred costs and generating additional economic incentives for environmentally friendly activities. Despite increasing global demand and willingness-to-pay for environmental services, their provision is insufficient. Bulky transaction costs and insufficient institutional alternatives are a reason for this imbalance.
Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) are a digital technology to manage databases without recurring to a central administrator or centralised data storage (Born, 2018).This study seeks to understand how distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) can contribute to improve the environmental and social outcomes of Payments for Environmental Services (PES) schemes. It investigates how DLTs can be harnessed to both facilitate the implementation of PES design principles proposed in the scientific literature, and counter recurrent issues of PES implementation.