China Policy Journal Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2018 | Page 68

Payment for Ecological Services and River Transboundary Pollution
point S (start) to point E (end) and goes
through five regions (A, B, C, D and F).
All five regions discharge pollution into
the river and thus can be considered
polluters. They also suffer from the concentration
of the pollution in the section
of the river flowing through their jurisdictions
and can thus be considered as
victims. However, it is important to distinguish
between the simple victims of
river water pollution and the victims of
the transboundary pollution; only the
latter can be qualified for the discussion
about payment ecological service compensation.
Region A is located at the
starting point of the river and does not
have upstream neighbors. Therefore, although
A is the polluter of the river and
victim of the pollution in the river due
to its own pollution discharge, it is not a
transboundary pollution victim. Taking
now the case of region B, since A is its
upstream neighbor, it is possible for B
to be a transboundary pollution victim.
However, to confirm the victim role of
region B, another condition is that the
quality of the river water received by
region B from region A is worse than
Class II, the targeted river water quality.
The same discussion can be applied
to regions C and D. Finally, for region
F, since it is located at the end point of
the river, F can only be a transboundary
victim but not a transboundary polluter
since the river water, after flowing
through the region F, will flow into the
ocean and thus does not affect other
populations living in the drainage basin.
Figure 1. Polluter and Victim in a Transboundary Pollution Case
Once the conditions to identify
transboundary pollution-related
polluters and victims are clear, another
related question is about when and
how the PES is installed. There are two
possible situations. First, although all
regions discharge pollution into the
river, if the water quality collected at all
transboundary sections of the river between
regions stays at a constant class
II level, it will not be necessary to apply
a PES mechanism because each region
manages to keep the water quality
as clean as the water they receive from
their upstream neighbors; therefore, we
can consider the situation as not having
transboundary pollution between regions
(Figure 2).
However, the situation can be
much more complicated if the information
about the water quality in the
transboundary section of the river is
organized as in Figure 3. The identification
of the polluter and victim of
transboundary pollution needs to con-
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