Q: How viable is trading of carbon credits as a mitigation measure?

A: They work well in certain systems, but then, is it for everyone? I believe that our textbook thinking is pretty bad here…
(Excerpt from interview of Elinor Ostrom in Financial Express, 5 Feb 2012) In the past decade, the idea of payments for ecosystem services (PES) has caught the attention of many donors, policy makers and researchers. It is now being touted as the solution for multiple problems: water scarcity, biodiversity loss and global warming. The powerful attraction of the idea is because it sounds non-coercive (communities may only do things that they perceive are in their economic interest) and win-win (poverty alleviation with environmental gains). The debate appears to have almost shifted away from ‘Is PES a good idea?’ to ‘How do we implement PES?’