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Stakeholders and Biodiversity at the Local Level: Building on
Opportunities
The overall aim of this project was concluded in 2005 and funded by the Swiss
Development Corporation (SDC), was to strengthen local people’s capacity to plan
and implement locally relevant and viable forest landscape management. One
component of the project aimed at assessing and evaluating viable opportunities
for trading in environmental services, and communicating the results to key
stakeholders.
If communities are to manage forests in ways that are compatible with
conservation they will have to benefit in some ways from doing this. This
project set out to identify and evaluate how this might be done. A range of
incentives were examined, including compensating forest owners and users for
environmental services that their forests supply (e.g. ecotourism opportunities,
watershed protection, or biodiversity). To be viable, such schemes must not only
benefit external stakeholders but also adequately compensate the landowners for
any opportunities that they forego in providing the services. Thus an
understanding of the perceptions and needs of local communities related to
forest landscapes was also needed, linking this to the other two objectives of
the project:
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To develop appropriate mechanisms for integrating local
perceptions and views in decision making and planning
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To facilitate greater involvement by local people and
other stakeholders in decision making and planning at the local level.
Fieldwork was carried out by CIFOR researchers and associates in Bolivia and
Vietnam. In Bolivia, a range of PES and PES-like initiatives were reviewed. The
results of this study have been recently published (Nina Robertson and Sven
Wunder, Fresh Tracks in the Forest: assessing incipient environmental services
initiatives in Bolivia, Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor,
Indonesia, 2005). CIFOR assisted a Bolivian NGO, Fundación Natura, in the
development of a pilot watershed protection payment scheme near Santa Cruz. A
number of suggestions were made for redesigning some of the management features
of the scheme, some of which have already been implemented with positive
outcomes. CIFOR also helped to develop a rapid hydrological assessment protocol,
to establish the link between water supply and upstream land use, so as to
provide an empirical underpinning for the PES agreement being negotiated with
downstream water users (see interim hydrology report). This approach has applications elsewhere.
Finally, two workshops on the potential of PES, organised jointly with our
Bolivian partner Fundación Natura, were held to present and discuss results with
Bolivian stakeholders in April 2006. One was designed as a half-day thematic
event at the Bolivian forestry congress in Santa Cruz, targeting mainly
professionals and academics. The second was held in La Paz, targeting actors in
the political arena and invited PES practitioners/ interestees from different
parts of Bolivia.
A similar survey of prototype PES schemes was conducted in Vietnam in
collaboration with Vietnamese partners from the University of Hué: “Payment is
good, control is better. Why payments for forest environmental services in
Vietnam have so far remained incipient”, by Sven Wunder, Bui Dung The and
Enrique Ibarra (download pdf
file CIFOR, 2005). The results of this study have been presented at a
workshop co-organized with the project Rewarding the Upland Poor for
Environmental Services (RUPES), led by the World Agroforestry Centre. The work
in Vietnam will continue through collaboration with RUPES and the Forest Science
Institute of Vietnam. The consortium is currently preparing a proposal to this
effect for the Vietnam Tropical Forest Fund.
Contact persons
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