56 CONVENIENT SOLUTIONS TO AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
BOX 3.4
Ecomarkets in Costa Rica Costa Rica’s Program of Payments for Environmental Services (PSA) is an innovative and highly successful effort to enlist private landholders to maintain and protect their forests voluntarily. Since its inception in 1997, the PSA Program has been applied to nearly 500,000 hectares of privately owned forests. Since 2001, the program has received funding under the Bank-GEF Ecomarkets Project. More than 130,000 hectares of high-priority biodiversity areas in the Costa Rican portion of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor have been included in the program. Another 70,000 hectares have been contracted on privately owned lands within other high-priority conservation areas, further contributing to the achievement of conservation and sustainable management goals. In 2000, only 22 female landholders participated in the program; by 2005, 474 women were participating. In 2000, 2,850 hectares of indigenous community-owned lands were in the program; by 2005 this figure had risen to 25,125 hectares, an eightfold increase. The PSA Program has been funded primarily by allocating 3.5 percent of the national fuel tax to the Fondo Nacional de Financiamiento Forestal (FONAFIFO). It has also attracted significant co-financing from bilateral donors, including Germany, Norway, and Japan. The Ecomarkets Project has not only provided additional financing to expand the program but also refocused it on global and regional biodiversity conservation as well as on national social goals. National benefits include the maintenance of privately owned forests in important biological corridors; local conservation of biological diversity; increased involvement of women landholders and indigenous communities with the PSA Program; direct payments to a greater number of small rural landholders; and, most important, broadscale public recognition that intact forests and their environmental services have value. The success of the Ecomarkets Project is based on a strong institution (FONAFIFO) that is capable of effectively and efficiently managing a complex system of payments for environmental services; the strong legal framework and wide political support for the PSA Program through three successive administrations; and the nationwide support from civil society, particularly small- and medium-size landholders as well as local and regional organizations (for example, NGOs and cooperatives). The PSA Program and the Ecomarkets Project have attracted widespread international interest, spurring several replication efforts. FONAFIFO has hosted official delegations from many countries wanting to study the program. The project has led to more effective conservation by creating linkages between geographically isolated protected areas through privately owned lands where biodiversity is legally protected through PSA contracts.