Institutionalizing Payments for Ecosystem Services

At CEO endorsement: 16 Feb 2007 The focus of the project will be to build the institutional foundations for Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) development by providing global and regional mechanisms to support national innovators through information sharing, capacity building and training and policy changes. The project has been developed with the involvement of the Katoomba Group which was created by the Forest Trends. The Group was established to explore and build on innovations in ecosystem service markets. The goal of the project is to increase the financial incentives for conservation of ecosystems and biodiversity. The project objective is to establish institutional capacity for expanding systems of payments for ecosystem services to a scale and quality sufficient to have a meaningful impact on global conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services. The project will also test and evaluate four promising operational models fro PES: agri-environmental payments with landscape-scale biodiversity impacts; biodiversity offsets for business investments; forest enterprises with portfolios including payments for biodiversity conservation; and coastal biodiversity payments for flood protection. At Workprogram Inclusion: The project’s development objectives are: 1.To overcome barriers to the development of biodiversity markets;2.To bring transparency to transactions and prices; 3.To encourage broad participation in the development of regulatory frameworks for biodiversity services;4.To advance the state-of-the-art by sharing lessons-learned from innovative biodiversity payment projects;5.To empower low-income forest, fishing, farming communities to participate in and benefit from these new markets, and influence their development to provide more level "playing field" in biodiversity market transactions.