The concept of payments for environmental services (PES) has emerged in recent years as a potential tool for achieving ecosystem conservation and improving the livelihoods of environmental-service providers and consumers. In Bolivia, as elsewhere, considerable uncertainty remains as to what exactly environmental services are, what PES means, to what extent they are currently being implemented, and what their prospects for success are.

Loosely defined, ‘environmental services’ refer to the benefits that the natural world provides to people. These benefits are numerous and wide-ranging, including services that improve land, air and water quality. Although these benefits are often substantial, they are...

Under the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, those developed countries that ratified it are committed to a net reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions of 5.2% (400 million tonnes of carbon per year) below 1990 levels by 2008–2012. To add flexibility to this requirement, the Protocol also includes the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which allows emitters to offset their emissions by financing carbon-emission mitigation and sequestration projects, a small part of which is in forestry. Because trees take up CO₂ as they grow, afforestation or reforestation projects can result in a net reduction of carbon...

Watershed protection is rapidly becoming the most important of the four types of environmental-service payments in Latin America. Increasing water shortages in many areas of high consumption have triggered the search for alternative ways to enhance supply. FAO recently brought together Latin American experts and practitioners in this field for a meeting in Arequipa, Peru (FAO 2004) and followed up with an electronic-conference discussing some of the emerging issues in depth (Manon 2004). In Bolivia, many leaders of PES initiatives focusing on watersheds have recently come together for two workshops in Santa Cruz and La Paz, organised within the framework...

Ecotourism is a nascent industry in Bolivia that has demonstrated rapid annual growth of 15% over the past five years (Alcoba 2004). From the establishment of the National Protected Area System in 1999 to 2002, numbers of visitors have doubled, from roughly 35 000 to 70 000 (J. Alcoba personal communication),¹⁸ and the vast majority of these visitors are foreign. At the same time, both the government and various conservation NGOs have encouraged the incorporation of local stakeholders in the protected area system through ecotourism. The National Protected Area Service (SERNAP, in its Spanish acronym) and ecotourism proponents hope that...

At the global level, biodiversity is probably the most highly valued among the services from (natural) forests in the Southern Hemisphere; yet paradoxically it is probably the one among them where least money has been invested in direct, contingent conservation systems. Biodiversity funding in general has recently seen a drastic decline from traditional sources like bilateral and multilateral ‘green’ aid. Data from the World Bank’s Program on Forests (PROFOR) show that bilateral forest-sector funding declined from slightly more than US$1 billion in 1990–92 to US$600–900 million in the late 1990s; for multilateral agencies the simultaneous decline was more...

This study set out with the objectives of providing on overview of various PES initiatives in Bolivia, assessing their most salient and critical environmental and livelihood effects, identifying the obstacles to and promoting factors for PES establishment, and if possible making specific suggestions for their future implementation. For each case study, we have presented effects, obstacles and promoting factors, and have suggested prospects for future sustainability. In this chapter, we present a summary of these findings.

Perhaps the main overall result is that the ‘pure’ PES scheme, with the five criteria we used to define PES in the Introduction (well-defined...