Publication: Payments for Environmental Services in Costa Rica
Abstract
Costa Rica pioneered the use of the payments for environmental services (PES) approach in developing countries by establishing a formal, country-wide program of payments, the PSA program. The PSA program has worked hard to develop mechanisms to charge the users of environmental services for the services they receive. It has made substantial progress in charging water users, and more limited progress in charging biodiversity and carbon sequestration users. Because of the way it makes payments to service providers (using approaches largely inherited from earlier programs), however, the PSA program has considerable room for improvement in the efficiency with which it generates environmental services. With experience, many of these weaknesses are being gradually corrected as the PSA program evolves towards a much more targeted and differentiated program. An important lesson is the need to be flexible and to adapt to lessons learned and to changing circumstances.
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Publication Can the Poor Participate in Payments for Environmental Services? Lessons from the Silvopastoral Project in Nicaragua(2008)This paper uses data from a Payments for Environmental Services (PES) project being implemented in Nicaragua to examine the extent to which poorer households that are eligible to participate are in fact able to do so, an issue over which there has been considerable concern. The study site provides a strong test of the ability of poorer households to participate, as it requires participants to make substantial and complex land use changes. The results show that poorer households are in fact able to participate--indeed, by some measures they participated to a greater extent than better-off households. Moreover, their participation was not limited to the simpler, least expensive options. Extremely poor households had a somewhat greater difficulty in participating, but even in their case the difference is solely a relative one. Transaction costs may be greater obstacles to the participation of poorer households than household-specific constraints.Publication Evaluation of the Permanence of Land Use Change Induced by Payments for Environmental Services in Quindío, Colombia(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-09)The effectiveness of conservation interventions such as Payments for Environmental Services (PES) is often evaluated, if it is evaluated at all, only at the completion of the intervention. Since gains achieved by the intervention may be lost after it ends, even apparently successful interventions may not result in long-term conservation benefits, a problem known as that of permanence. This paper uses a unique dataset to examine the permanence of land use change induced by a short-term PES program implemented in Quindío, Colombia, between 2003 and 2008. This the first PES program to have a control group for comparison. Under this program, PES had been found to have a positive and highly significant impact on land use. To assess the long-term permanence of these changes, both PES recipients and control households were re-surveyed in 2011, four years after the last payment was made. We find that the land use changes that had been induced by PES were broadly sustained in intervening years, with minor differences across specific practices and sub-groups of participants. The patterns of change in the period after the PES program was completed also help better understand the reasons for the program s success. These results suggest that, at least in the case of productive land uses such as silvopastoral practices, PES programs can be effective at encouraging land owners to adopt environmentally-beneficial management practices and that the benefits will persist after payments cease.Publication Impact of Costa Rica's Program of Payments for Environmental Services on Land Use(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-10)Costa Rica's Program of Payments for Environmental Services (Pago de Servicios Ambientales, PSA) provides a unique opportunity to evaluate direct payments as a conservation policy tool. This paper reports evidence on how much more forest has been conserved in Costa Rica as a result of PSA contracts with landowners. Such evidence requires estimating a counterfactual outcome: how much forest would have been preserved if there had been no payments. By applying rigorous program evaluation methods that have been recommended for identifying the causal effects of conservation policies, we find that the PSA program does result in a small but statistically significant increase in the area of forest conserved.Publication Evaluation of the Impact of Payments for Environmental Services on Land Use Change in Quindío, Colombia(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-09)The growing use of Payments for Environmental Services (PES) for conservation has fostered a debate on its effectiveness, but the few efforts to date to assess the impact of PES programs have been hampered by lack of data, leading to very divergent results. This paper uses data from a PES mechanism implemented in Quindío, Colombia, to examine the impact of PES on land use change. Alone among all early PES initiatives, the Silvopastoral Project included a control group of nonparticipants, whose land use changes were monitored throughout the project period, as well as detailed baseline data on both PES recipients and control group members. By comparing the land use changes undertaken by PES recipients to those undertaken by control group members, we can distinguish the impact of PES from that of other factors. The results show that payments had a positive and highly significant impact on land use change, under a variety of model formulations. PES recipients converted over 40 percent of their farms to environmentally-friendly land uses over 4 years, increasing environmental service provision by almost 50 percent. In contrast, control group members converted less than 20 percent of their farms, increasing environmental service provision by only 7 percent.Publication Brazil's Experience with Payments for Environmental Services(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-08-01)Since 2006, there has been an explosion of Payments for Environmental Services (PES) projects in Brazil, as well as efforts to pass PES laws at federal, state, and municipal levels. Even in this short period, an extraordinarily rich range of experiences has developed, with examples of the application of PES at a variety of scales, ranging from microwatersheds to entire states; in a variety of contexts, from remote forest frontier areas to the periurban fringe of megacities like São Paulo; and using a variety of approaches, using direct payments by users, sales to regulated and voluntary carbon markets, government funding, and mixes of these approaches. In this paper, we provide an overview of Brazilian PES efforts to date, and attempt to extract some initial lessons.
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