Building a Transparent and Trusted Accounting System in Oregon's Willamette Valley that Enables Farmers and Foresters to Participate in Market-Based Incentives Programs for Ecosystem Services

The focus of the proposed project is to provide cropland and forestland managers with the tools and resources they need to make conservation incentives part of their land management strategies. In particular, the project will make ecosystem service markets more available and accessible to farmers and foresters. The project has three ways in which this objective will be achieved. First, ready access to ecosystem service markets depends on having a structured market where buyers and sellers of goods can easily connect and transactions can occur in a common, uniform currency. The Willamette Partnership is committed to creating this framework and is developing many components of the marketplace through existing EPA grants. The proposed project will focus on obtaining acceptance from regulatory agencies on the common currency. This aspect of the project will build upon a significant amount of currency development work accomplished by the Oregon Department of Transportation over the past three years. Second, for a wide range of farmers and foresters to be able to access the market, the tools used in that market must be user-friendly. Accordingly, the second component of the project is development of a user friendly database interface for the accounting method (the currency). The development of this interface will help standardize the currency, make it less subject to error and make it more usable by private individuals. Third, in addition to an easy to use interface, farmers and foresters will benefit from additional user friendly tools that allow them to make decisions about using market incentives as part of their land management approach. The need for these tools will be identified through coordination with the farmers and foresters that comprise the ultimate user group. Examples of some anticipated tools that will be developed include a rapid assessment approach that allows land owners to easily assess the financial desirability of pursuing market incentive strategies and a tool to help them understand the available market incentives and the advantages/disadvantages of those various incentive programs.