Cluster analysis of landowners that provide environmental services to implement an urban payment scheme

Abstract

Payments for Environmental Services (PES) are voluntary schemes designed to provide incentives for providing environmental services (ES) on lands with the potential to develop productive activities. The PES have been implemented, for the most part, in rural contexts, and their extension to urban contexts requires adjustments in the design of the traditional scheme. On that need, there are not enough advances reported in the literature. To design a PES in urban areas (PSAU), we pretend to understand the heterogeneity that characterizes the landholders and their properties, where the ecosystem provider of the ES is located. This article presents a grouping exercise of 111 selected properties to be part of a PSAU in Colombia, in order to identify similar characteristics between the groups, which facilitate the design of payment strategies. The grouping was done considering specific variables of the urban context and with the k-prototypes cluster analysis algorithm, resulting in the division of the properties into three groups. We found that two of the three groups have more differentiating characteristics: the first is mostly private, with smaller and more expensive total areas; while the other is mainly public, with a larger total area and at a lower cost. We concluded that the payment to be recognized for the first group should be very attractive if you want to have a good adoption, since the opportunity cost represented by the availability and value of the land is higher. The other group could be the one that adopts more easily because it has a larger area and a lower economic value, because of in this group the properties are mainly public domain, social appropriation actions with the community are fundamental. The clustering method turned out to be an adequate process to address the heterogeneity present in the urban context.