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The Wetland Example of Payments for Ecosystem Services (WEPES) project concerns a section of historic floodplain on the River Fal in West Cornwall.

The two-year project has been underway since late 2009. It is led by the Westcountry Rivers Trust, and involves monetisation of the costs and benefits of a wide range of ecosystem goods and services that are or could be generated from the study area. It also involves identifying organisations, groups or individuals willing to pay for ecosystem goods and service benefits.

A crucial feature is that the site, which is currently set out in different land parcels each currently under a different management regime, represents a microcosm of the whole catchment. This will allow changes in management regimes of different degrees and qualities to be tested in their capacity to deliver different end target wetland habitats and long-term protection mechanisms. This will generate variations in the economic benefits and therefore the likely investment achievable per parcel and will be vital in establishing what funding potential there is on a catchment scale.

Furthermore, WEPES is running in parallel with a bigger project that has similar objectives but takes into account several other rivers, including the Axe and Exe. This larger project – called WATER (Wetted Land: the Assessment, Techniques and Economics of Restoration) – has a three-year timeframe and is funded through the Interreg mechanism.

The rationale for including WEPES as a demonstrator project is that it provides opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of an ecosystems approach in valuing and monetising the ecosystem services provided and in securing payments for them by linking benefits to actual or potential beneficiaries. The project has the potential to demonstrate practical applications of methods for establishing a ‘zone of potential agreement’ between beneficiaries’ willingness-to-pay for ecosystem goods and services and landowners’ willingness-to-accept payment to change land management practices.