New tools for the EU agricultural sector and rural areas. What role for public policy in promoting payments for ecosystem services?

In this paper we try to understand if it is possible to create a market for ecosystem services deriving from rural landscape and environmental conservation. First of all to do this we consider the results of some studies we conducted during last years about monetary and no-monetary environmental evaluation. These studies help us firstly to identify some rural landscape features able to improve or to worsen landscape aspect and secondly to point out the willingness to pay of beneficiaries to maintain landscape and environment features. Then to understand if it is possible to increase social benefits by using market and economic instruments in favor of landscape and environmental resources conservation, we study Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). PES are economic instruments that can be used to support ecosystem services conservation and improvement. We describe this instrument and discuss the opportunity to introduce it in favor of some ecosystem services in Italy.