Payments for environmental services (PES) are an innovative approach to conservation that has been applied increasingly often in both developed and developing countries. To date, however, few efforts have been made to systematically compare PES experiences.

Marketing several environmental services from a single area can help access diverse sources of funding and make conservation a more competitive land use. In Bolivia's Los Negros valley (Department of Santa Cruz), bordering the Ambor

Payments for environmental services (PES) have attracted increasing interest as a mechanism to translate external, non-market values of the environment into real financial incentives for local actors to provide environmental services (ES).

The Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESA) program, when launched in the United Kingdom (UK) in 1986, was the first agri-environmental program in the European Union (EU). This program grew to a total of 43 designated ESA schemes in the UK as a whole, 22 of which were in England.

Decentralization reforms in Indonesia have led to local communities negotiating logging agreements with timber companies for relatively low financial payoffs and at high environmental cost. This paper analyzes the potential of payments for environmental services (PES) to provide an alternative to logging for these communities and to induce forest conservation.

A payments for ecosystem services (PES) system came about in South Africa with the establishment of the government-funded Working for Water (WfW) programme that clears mountain catchments and riparian zones of invasive alien plants to restore natural fire regimes, the productive potential of land, biodiversity, and hydrological functioning. The success of the programme is largely attributed to it being mainly funded as a poverty-relief initiative, although water users also contribute through their water fees.

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.

Payments for environmental services (PES) have been distinguished from the more common integrated conservation and development projects on the grounds that PES are direct, more cost-effective, less complex institutionally, and therefore more likely to produce the desired results.

Few payment for environmental services (PES) schemes in developing countries operate outside of the central state's umbrella, and are at the same time old enough to allow for a meaningful evaluation. Ecuador has two such decentralised, consolidated experiences: the five-year old Pimampiro municipal watershed-protection scheme and the twelve-year old PROFAFOR carbon-sequestration programme.

Payments for environmental services (PES) are an innovative approach to conservation that has been applied increasingly often in both developed and developing countries. To date, however, few efforts have been made to systematically compare PES experiences.

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