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Do Costa Rica's payments for environmental services work? mongabay.com September 17, 2007
In the 1990s Costa Rica set a new course; one that sought to unlock the value of its ecosystems. While ecotourism was the most obvious path, Costa Rica also pioneered the development of payments for environmental services ("PSA" or pagos por servicios ambientales). In 1996 the country established a program to compensate landowners for keeping forests intact and reforesting degraded areas. A new study, published in Conservation Biology, examines these efforts and concludes concludes that while the program pioneered the institutionalization of a policy that can and likely will create meaningful incentives, to this point in Costa Rica, given other policies, it appears to have had little impact on deforestation.
Some details from the paper: Payments under the PSA program:
Costa Rica's experiment "opens the door" for future PSA programs in other parts of the world, say the researchers. "We believe Costa Rica's pioneering effort opens the door to further successful PSA programs. The evaluation of its first phase provides important conservation lessons for developing countries interested in similar policies and for new global policies," they conclude. CITATION: G. Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa, Alexander Pfaff, Juan Andres Robalino, and Judson P. Boomhower (2007). Costa Rica's Payment for Environmental Services Program: Intention, Implementation, and Impact. Conservation Biology. DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2007.00751.x Related articles Environmentalists announce support for carbon trading (9/14/2007) A coalition of environmental groups announced it will support the development of carbon trading policies that help protect tropical rainforests and other important ecosystems, noting that "conservation alone has proven no match for commerce." Rainforest countries form pact to push global warming solutions (9/13/2007) Eight tropical countries containing 80 percent of the world's remaining tropical forest cover have formed an alliance to have forest conservation included in a post-Kyoto agreement on climate change, reports the Financial Times. The "Forestry Eight", as the group is called, includes Brazil, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Gabon, Cameroon, Costa Rica, Congo and Indonesia. Indonesia's peatlands may offer U.S. firms global warming offsets (8/29/2007) The following is modified version of a letter I've used to pitch U.S. companies on the concept of carbon finance in Indonesia's peatlands. Discussions are slow and the critical December U.N. climate meeting is fast approaching, so I'm posting this as a tool to help you get American firms interested in avoided deforestation offsets. Please feel free to use, modify, and distribute this letter widely. Avoided deforestation could send $38 billion to third world under global warming pact (10/31/2006) Avoided deforestation will be a hot point of discussion at next week's climate meeting in Nairobi, Kenya. Already a coalition of 15 rainforest nations have proposed a plan whereby industrialized nations would pay them to protect their forests to offset greenhouse gas emissionsm. Meanwhile, last month Brazil -- which has the world's largest extent of tropical rainforests and the world's highest rate of forest loss -- said it promote a similar initiative at the talks. At stake: potentially billions of dollars for developing countries. When trees are cut greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere -- roughly 20 percent of annual emissions of such heat-trapping gases result from deforestation and forest degradation. Avoided deforestation is the concept where countries are paid to prevent deforestation that would otherwise occur. Policymakers and environmentalists alike find the idea attractive because it could help fight climate change at a low cost while improving living standards for some of the world's poorest people and preserving biodiversity and other ecosystem services. A number of prominent conservation biologists and development agencies including the World Bank and the U.N. have already endorsed the idea.
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Deforestation rates in Costa Rica, 1960-2005. Modified from Sanchez-Azofeifa et al 2007. Image by R. Butler.
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