The natural environment provides society with many services which are crucial for our survival such as biodiversity conservation, water provision and purification, climate stabilization, disease control and storm protection.
While environmental protection is vital, a fundamental problem facing conservation is finance – especially for the vast amount of the planet’s biodiversity that lies outside of protected areas.
New market-based mechanisms that encourage biodiversity and resource conservation are a promising set of tools to help take conservation and sustainable natural resource management to global scale and significance while simultaneously benefitting the guardians of those services – the often marginalized forest communities.
Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are a way to incentivize land users to properly manage and conserve their natural environment – thus ensuring the flow of ecosystem services (Pagiola and Platiais, 2002). These schemes compensate those who provide ecosystem services through direct payments, selling credits for carbon, biodiversity or water on international or national markets, or through other similar mechanisms as will be described throughout this book.
