Fresh tracks in the forest: assessing incipient payments for environmental services initiatives in Bolivia

Abstract

Executive Summary:As threats to the world’s ecosystems grow and change, increasing attention hasbeen focused on the important services that ecosystems provide to humans. Theseservices include carbon sequestration and storage, watershed protection, andlandscape beauty and biodiversity conservation. Worldwide, a new generation ofconservation initiatives aims at creating systems in which the users of one or moreenvironmental services compensate resource managers for improved conservationof these services. Such systems, termed ‘payments for environmental services’(PES), may have the potential to protect environmental services while at the sametime improving local livelihoods. This study provides an overview and assessmentof environmental, economic and social effects of various PES-related initiativesas well as an overview of challenges and promoting factors to PES in Bolivia.We use five criteria to define PES systems: a voluntary agreement, a well-definedservice, at least one buyer, at least one seller, and a conditional (quid pro quo)transaction.We examined 17 initiatives that were either ongoing or under preparation invarious parts of Bolivia. We were able to closely analyse nine of these, which weconsider our primary case studies. Most of these initiatives are still fairly young,and the analyses of their effects remain preliminary. Conceptually, we foundthat none of the existing initiatives in Bolivia satisfies all the above-mentionedcriteria. Thus, no ‘pure’ PES scheme currently exists in Bolivia. However, severalexperiences use direct economic incentives and satisfy several of the criteria.There is thus a broader family of ‘PES-like’ projects exhibiting some importantPES elements.Five of the nine initiatives that we analysed closely were community-basedtourism initiatives that focus on landscape beauty, profiting from the growingecotourism market in Bolivia and existing tour operations near protected areas.Watershed PES systems were the second most common (three cases) and haveExecutive Summaryxiireceived substantial attention, both because of a growing scarcity of water andbecause of the ideological–political controversies in Bolivia about using any typeof market-based system to manage watersheds. There has only been one carbonproject (Noel Kempff) in Bolivia, while others are in the pipeline. BiodiversityPES systems have basically all remained incipient initiatives without takingoff, probably primarily because of uncertain markets in the case of biodiversitypremiums for products and uncertain land-tenure systems for conservationconcessions. However, biodiversity protection is ‘bundled’ with six of the nineinitiatives; conservation organisations with a primary interest in biodiversityprotection use other services (particularly ecotourism) as an entry and leveragepoint for pursuing biodiversity conservation.Our analysis of the environmental effects, which we estimated by assessingchanges in environmental threats, showed generally net positive protectioneffects in the nine PES-like initiatives, but also a large variation in environmentalprotection efficiency. This is to some extent explained by the short lifespan ofsome of the initiatives, but otherwise mostly to be blamed on case-by-case designfactors. The economic effects also varied in size, but were generally positive: allmajor groups participating as environmental-service sellers were made better offin economic terms—there were no trends of people being ‘trapped’ by PES ina negative livelihood outcome. The magnitude of gains varied according to theproject age, the amount of external support and the management of the system.Some groups other than PES recipients proper could lose out from PES-likeinitiatives, e.g. landless labourers who had hoped to colonise land being protectedin a PES system. This can also cause equity concerns and social tensions. On theother hand, we also found a series of community-wide positive social effects, suchas improved organisation and articulation vis-à-vis outside actors, and training.Several of the PES-like initiatives could be transformed into full PES systems;certainly in some cases this is a necessity, as when sellers of environmentalservices exist, but donors are bridging the current lack of buyers willing to payfor these services. Our recommendations for the future design of successfulPES systems include, among others, trust-building among participants and athorough understanding of future PES demand, supply and future transactioncosts. For initiatives currently underway, more efforts should be made to monitorenvironmental impacts, directly reward those environmental-service providersthat comply with the contingent PES agreements, and keep all stakeholders wellinformed of the goals, challenges and progress of the PES initiative. The prospectsfor PES success warrant future exploration and support.