National forest funds and Payments for Ecosystem Services in Costa Rica, Morocco and Vietnam.
National Forest Funds (NFFs) represent a significant funding source for the forest sector globally. Integrating biodiversity in these domestic financing instruments could be an opportunity to increase financing flows for biodiversity conservation and the provision of ecosystem services. In this paper, the authors – among whom are Davide Pettenella and Alex Pra, Founding Partner and Project Manager of Etifor – analysed three NFF case studies in order to assess if and to what extent NFFs already operate on Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) or PES-like mechanisms.
The analysis highlights the fact that the evaluated NFFs in Costa Rica, Morocco, and Vietnam have PES-like mechanism characteristics and that NFFs could play a relevant intermediary role between ecosystem services providers and buyers. While several countries are in the process of establishing or reforming NFFs, there is a window of opportunity to mainstream biodiversity objectives in NFFs, including for PES-like schemes. The article finally draws attention to how these orientations could be applied to one of the NFF case studies, i.e. Morocco.
Title and publication:
“How can National Forest Funds catalyse the provision of ecosystem services? Lessons learned from Costa Rica, Vietnam, and Morocco”.
Published on:
Ecosystem Services
Volume 47, February 2021, 101228
Authors:
- Ludwig Liagre
- Davide Pettenella
- Alex Pra
- Felipe Carazo Ortiz
- Alberto Garcia Arguedas
- Cuong Nguyen Chiene