Northern Everglades Payment for Environmental Services (NE-PES), Florida

The Northern Everglades Payment for Environmental Services (NE-PES) programme pays cattle ranchers in the Lake Okeechobee watershed (Highlands, Okeechobee and Glades counties, Florida) to retrofit ditches and culverts so pastureland retains water and filters phosphorus and nitrogen before it reaches the lake and the Everglades. It grew out of the Florida Ranchlands Environmental Services Project (FRESP), a 2005-2011 pilot on eight ranches led by a coalition including SFWMD, Florida's agriculture and environmental protection departments, USDA NRCS, the University of Florida, WWF and Archbold Biological Station.

SFWMD launched NE-PES with its first solicitation in January 2011 (14 proposals submitted, 8 approved). Under 10-year contracts, ranchers are paid per acre-foot of water retained and/or per pound of phosphorus and nitrogen removed at contracted performance levels, verified by monitoring, plus reimbursement for design, permitting and construction and an annual operations-and-maintenance payment. In December 2014 SFWMD's Governing Board approved six additional contracts, funded by a Florida Legislature appropriation of $5 million one-time plus $5 million recurring.

SFWMD reporting shows the first nine NE-PES projects, built by around 2014, collectively retaining approximately 6,700 acre-feet of water. The December 2014 expansion added a further 95,812 acre-feet of storage capacity. The design and monitoring approach is documented in peer-reviewed literature (Bohlen et al. 2009; Boughton et al. 2019).

The Florida Legislature itself has flagged that a continuing source of funding is needed to sustain the programme, and by Water Year 2016 the wider dispersed-water-management effort NE-PES sits within had 40 operational projects but a further 10 stuck in planning and 7 still in design or permitting — evidence of slower-than-intended scale-up. Total lifetime programme budget and aggregate phosphorus-load-reduction figures were not found in publicly accessible form.