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Policy Paper: Assessing prerequisites for market-based REDD+ activities 22
mainstreaming of forest protection considerations into other policy fields will represent a complex and timeconsuming
process, countries will also have to make a choice on the policy instruments in the forestry sector.
3.3.2 Choosing the adequate forestry policy instruments
Under a future REDD+ scheme, a great variety of policy instruments may be available to individual REDD+
countries. Making a decision on which policy might work best is strongly linked to the identification of the
underlying causes of deforestation as well as an analysis of the specific national circumstances.
Payments for environmental services (PES)
Payments for environmental services (PES) can be defined as “voluntary, conditional transactions between at
least one buyer and one seller for well-defined environmental services or corresponding land use proxies”
(Wunder 2009). Once established, a functioning REDD+ mechanism will in itself represent a PES-like system
functioning either via public funding or carbon markets. In a national level PES system, individuals and
communities voluntarily enter a contractual relationship with the buyer to receive payments for environmental
services. For such a contract to be concluded, the level of payments the sellers receive for their environmental
services has to be high enough to make the protection and enhancement of forests more attractive
than their destruction. Difficulties in estimating these dynamic opportunity costs can be extraordinarily high,
for instance when not dealing with a well-functioning market, where the perceived opportunity costs could
deviate extremely from the costs a market would suggest. For some practices opportunity costs may even be
inappropriate, for instance for illegal logging activities (Gregersen et al. 2010).
Furthermore, for such a system to function, exclusivity of land rights (tenure) and equitable benefit sharing
agreements have to be established. However, these conditions are not met everywhere. In the Brazilian Amazon,
for instance, 67% of the threatened forestland is subject to ill-defined or non-clarified tenure (Börner et
al. 2011). PES may further pose large burdens on forest dependent peoples, since the costs for quantification
of mitigation levels might be too high. Even if communities have the necessary resources to contract technical
assistance, there may not be sufficient advisors with the adequate experiences. The experiences from
Mexico show that most land users need professional assistance in order to access payments for water, biodiversity
or carbon services (FAO 2012).
Concessions for forest protection
Another policy option for implementing REDD+ is recurring to existing commercial forestry management
arrangements such as forest concessions, where the government concedes the right to use the forest and demands
royalties or other fees in return (Costenbader 2011). The government can then freely distribute these
revenues among local or regional governments and local communities. While this represents one major advantage
for countries without an adequate legal REDD+ framework, corruption is one main concern with this
approach. Government officials may make an arrangement with large companies and decide on a concession
at the expense of local communities, which are not properly involved in the decision-making process. Even if
local communities are actively and freely participating in the decision-making, the risk of uneven revenue
distribution remains high (Costenbader 2011).
Community forest management
The advantages of consigning the management of forests to the communities living in and from these forests
seems most obvious, particularly since there are vast experiences with communities managing forests. About
Nicolas Kreibich, Christof Arens and Wolfgang Sterk
Wuppertal Institute