Information for G04268
Bangladesh jatka marine conservation programme
The Hilsa Conservation Programme (HSP) in Bangladesh combines environmental and social objectives, using a mix of regulation (bans) and payments for ecosystem services (PES) as compensation. PES rewards good ecosystem management agreements (such as improving soil conservation or refraining from damaging activities like overfishing) expected to result in ecosystem benefits like cleaner water and reduced carbon emissions (Engel, 2015; Wunder, 2015), or, in this case, an improvement in provisioning services, that is bigger juvenile hilsa fish (Islam et al., 2016).
The primary goal of this scheme is the conservation of hilsa and associated biodiversity, but as it is funded through a national Vulnerable Group Feeding (VGF) programme, which aims to reduce food insecurity (Ahmed et al., 2009; Uraguchi, 2011), it is intended also to improve the socioeconomic condition of affected fishers living inside and around the sanctuary areas (DoF, 2012; Haldar and Ali, 2014).
This case study is one of several relating to the Toolkit: Ecosystems, poverty alleviation and conditional transfers. To access the full toolkit and other related case studies, please visit the ‘Publications’ section of the IIED project linked at the bottom of this page.
This project will explore the potential for combining payments for ecosystem services (PES) and conditional social transfers (CST) at national and sub-national level to simultaneously alleviate poverty and address environmental problems.
More at www.iied.org:
Conditional transfers for poverty reduction and ecosystem management