Watershed Conservation Auction: Payments for Ecosystem Services

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes pay landowners to protect the natural capital their land provides — clean water, pollination, carbon storage — following the valuation logic laid out by the TEEB framework. This simulator focuses on one specific mechanism inside that world: a cost-effectiveness reverse auction for a watershed conservation budget. Eighty-one upstream parcels each carry a private opportunity cost and a public water-quality service value that decays with distance from the river. Run the auction in targeted mode to enroll the cheapest, highest-value parcels first, or switch to random enrollment to see the same budget buy far less water-quality improvement — the same efficiency gap that drives real programs toward competitive, cost-effectiveness-ranked conservation contracts instead of flat per-hectare payments.