This chapter presents the design and implementation of the USDA Conservation Reserve Programme, a national agri-environmental programme that provides payments to landholders to retire farmland and improve the environmental quality of agricultural land. The CRP implements a range of management practices to protect highly erodible and environmentally sensitive land, improve water quality, and enhance wildlife habitat. The programme allocates contracts via an auctioning mechanism, targeting payments according to environmental benefits and cost. This helps enhance the cost-effectiveness of the programme. The challenges and lessons learned from the CRP are discussed.

This chapter presents the Tasmanian Forest Conservation Fund, a PES programme that aims to protect old growth forest on private land. Design elements, such as the use of a Conservation Value Index to identify areas of forest with high benefits and high threat of loss, and the use of inverse auctions to reduce the costs of obtaining these benefits are discussed. Finally, the chapter discusses the lessons learned and how these are being applied in the Environmental Stewardship Programme.

This chapter discusses a pilot inverse auction PES programme applied in the Sumberjaya Watershed in Indonesia to reduce sedimentation from coffee plantations. The process of design and implementation is discussed, highlighting issues that arise in a developing country context. The chapter also discusses how the pilot auction can be used as a price revelation mechanism, enabling payments to better reflect the costs of ecosystem services provision for any future scaled-up PES programme.

This chapter highlights the key policy-relevant outcomes and lessons learned from across the book to enhance the cost-effectiveness of current and future Payments for Ecosystem Services programmes. In particular, the key criteria for effective PES are summarised and the main design elements of the three in-depth PES case studies reviewed in the book are compared.