Sustainable Forest Management, Biodiversity and Livelihoods: a good Practice Guide

Payments for environmental services

• Payments for environmental services (PES) can be defined as: voluntary transactions whereby a defined environmental service (or a land-use likely to secure that service) is bought by a buyer from a provider, on the condition that the provider secures provision of the service (Wunder 2008).
• PES is a type of economic instrument that provides incentives to land owners to supply environmental services, which benefit society more broadly.
• Environmental services markets have been developed for carbon sequestration, watershed services, biodiversity conservation, and landscape beauty / recreation.
• PES projects can potentially serve the dual goals of preserving critical ecosystem services and the biodiversity upon which they depend, while also contributing to poverty reduction (UNEP and IUCN n.d.).

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