Brazil's Experience with Payments for Environmental Services

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 experi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pagiola, Stefano, Carrascosa von Glehn, Helena, Taffarello, Denise
Format: Working Paper
Language:English
en_US
Published: World Bank, Washington, DC 2014
Subjects:
Online Access:http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2013/08/19304132/brazils-experience-payments-environmental-services
http://hdl.handle.net/10986/17854
Description
Summary: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.