Making the priceless valuable: forests and ecosystem services

Abstract

Historically, forest ecosystem services have been undervalued or not valued at all, thus encouraging the destruction and conversion of our global forest estate. Fortunately, these last decades have witnessed a real shift – the active and innovative development of markets and payments for the ecosystem values of forests and other ecosystems. Payments for Environmental Services programs are now in place around the globe. Schemes focused on forest carbon, such as the California Cap-and-Trade law, programs in China and Colombia, South Korea and Chile, coupled with new initiatives in the aviation sector, point to steady progress toward the carbon/climate value of forests. Innovative green infrastructure initiatives around water and watersheds in Peru, Costa Rica, Australia and South Africa provide another growing stream of value for forests. And sustainable commodity supply chains and conservation banking bring more large-scale private sector actors and new business sectors to the table. Here we provide a global status of PES around the world.