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PES Projects
CIFOR has conducted five major projects (past, ongoing, or incipient) with a focus on payments for environmental services:
Scaling up payments for watershed services: Designing
regional compensation systems to safeguard water supplies for downstream
agriculture
This two-year project, funded by the Civil Society
Organizations (CSO) window of the Consultative Group on International
Agricultural research (CGIAR), started in May 2008. Its primary objective is to
assist the Departmental Government of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, to develop a
Department-wide environmental services compensation system under which areas
such as the 780 000 hectares of the Rio Grande watershed will be managed for the
environmental services they provide. The second and third objectives of the
project are to document the lessons learned in the process, and to apply them in
other contexts through a cross-site learning network, starting elsewhere in
Bolivia, India, Ecuador, and South Africa. The project will build upon
on-the-ground experiments in three continents and use a comparative analysis to
generate knowledge and capacity building tools that can be shared globally,
including trying to explain the different degrees of development of watershed
payment schemes across the tropics. Adapting the approach from elsewhere in
Bolivia and incorporating lessons learned from two other developing countries
will help to put the lessons learnt in Santa Cruz into perspective. This will
ensure that the international public goods produced are more adaptable, the
recommendations are more robust, and that the potential replicability of the
model is greater.
For more information, please contact Nigel Asquith (Fundación Natura Bolivia) (nigelasquith@naturabolivia.org)
or Sven Wunder (CIFOR): s.wunder@cgiar.org
Uncovering the scope for environmental
service payments in the conservation of the North Andean Corridor
This one-year project was funded by Conservation International (CI) to
advance the cause of conservation in the North Andean Conservation Corridor.
It involved studying PES and PES-like initiatives in
Colombia and Venezuela, coupling these with a knowledge of PES schemes
elsewhere in Latin America and other areas of the tropics. Colombia is
recognised as a leader in PES and conservation incentives. A principal
objective of this project was to identify specific sites in Venezuela where
a pilot PES scheme could successfully be implemented. The project also aimed
to disseminate the main lessons from these initiatives to the broader
regional and global conservation science communities and, specifically, to
feed into the current global scoping exercise of PES being undertaken by CI.
Lessons were designed for the Venezuelan side of the North-Andean Corridor,
where biophysical context is similar to that in neighbouring Colombia, but
where work on PES scheme was less advanced. Understanding the preconditions,
obstacles and enabling actions needed to implement PES helped to provide a
site-specific road map for pilot initiatives elsewhere.
More information
Making Nature Count: enhancing payments
for environmental service initiatives in Ecuador and Colombia
This project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, started in 01-01-07. It aims to create a network of different local-level PES implementation schemes at various development stages. The project is distilling some key lessons on the factors influencing the success or failure of payments-for-environmental-services schemes under different conditions in Ecuador and Colombia. The two countries have some of the most biologically diverse terrestrial landscapes on Earth, but they are also among the most threatened from habitat degradation and loss. The project involves in-depth analysis and field surveys in 4-5 existing payments-for-environmental-services schemes. This information is being used in turn to initiate PES at 1-2 new sites, to make specific suggestions on the design of PES at these sites, provide field support and mentoring, and possibly supply strategic financial resources for pilot payments. The project is establishing a forum for the exchange of information on PES and for helping to build capacity to implement PES in the two countries.
More information
Stakeholders and biodiversity at
the local level: building on opportunities
The overall aim of this project, concluded in 2005 and funded by the Swiss
Development Corporation, was to strengthen local people’s capacity to plan
and implement locally relevant and viable forest landscape management
activities in a number of tropical countries. One of three project
components involved assessing and evaluating viable opportunities for
trading in environmental services, and communicating the results to key
stakeholders. Fieldwork was carried out by CIFOR researchers and associates
in Bolivia and Vietnam.
More information
Carbon sequestration and sustainable
livelihoods
With support from the Canadian government through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), CIFOR facilitated a series of workshops and roundtable discussions in 2005 on issues related to growing trees to sequester carbon and its influence on people’s livelihoods. Interest in this topic arose out of the potential for such projects through the land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) provisions of the Kyoto Protocol. Properly designed, these projects could conserve and/or increase carbon stock and at the same time improve rural livelihoods. Among the topics discussed have been: what are the requirements of mandatory vs. voluntary carbon trading markets; what do project partners need to do to benefit from these; and what other ecosystem services (including water and biodiversity protection) could such initiatives provide in a bundled form, possibly being compensated for by interested stakeholders?
More information
In a separate but related project,
Tropical Forests and
Climate Change Adaptation (TROFCCA), CIFOR is exploring possible
innovative mechanisms to finance adaptation to climate change including,
perhaps, payment for environmental services.
See also
Paying People to Protect their Forests and
Paying Countries to
Protect their Forests
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