Abstract
Even though water-related forest ecosystem services are important for forestry and water management sectors, they have different definitions and are regulated differently in each sector, which makes them poorly recognized. How stakeholders from two main sectors (forestry and water management) perceive the importance of water-related forest ecosystem services, the trade-offs between ecosystem services and the effectiveness and implementation of payments schemes related to forest water ecosystem services were our areas of interest. We have conduct surveys with different groups of stakeholders from both sectors in four selected countries (the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia and Serbia) with a lot of similarities and the potential to learn from each other. The results show that in spite of the spotted differences among analyzed countries, there is a high level of agreement among respondents on all investigated aspects. In addition, even though different payment schemes exist in three of four countries, stakeholders are rarely aware of their existence, or it is better to say that they do not recognize them as payment schemes for ecosystem services because of their names and definitions, which do not clearly define ecosystem services. Mostly, they use bundled services and non-voluntary payments and are designed and implemented by the states. Due to the strong role of states and the low transparency in the existing schemes, we looked at possible conditions reflected through stakeholders’ opinions for overcoming that obstacle for the development of new payment schemes. We found that there is a high level of acceptance of payments schemes as more effective than “command and control” schemes and of the involvement of other stakeholders in decision-making processes as those conditions that can positively influence development of new payment schemes in all four countries. These results give us hope that in spite of the strong role of the state in selected countries, the role of stakeholders will be more acknowledged and, by that, the future schemes will be more harmonized among the sectors and their goals and needs, contributing to its effectiveness as well.
Highlights
Forests, as ecosystems, provide a range of benefits to people [1,2,3] of which waterrelated ecosystem services (WES) are considered critical to human well-being [4,5]
The respondents were distributed by countries as follows: 29 from the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (22.1% of the total), 38 from Croatia (29.0%), 28 from Serbia (21.4%) and 36 from Slovenia (27.5%)
The results show that most respondents with more than 15 years of experience come from the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (72.4%) and Croatia (47.4%), while in Serbia, the majority of respondents have between 1 and 5 years of experience (39.3%) and, in Slovenia, between 6 and 10 years of experience (27.8%)
Summary
As ecosystems, provide a range of benefits to people [1,2,3] of which waterrelated ecosystem services (WES) are considered critical to human well-being [4,5]. A clean and reliable drinking water supply is one of the most important benefits of well-managed forests. Other services provided by forests include the regulation of groundwater and surface water flow, water purification, the control of runoff and erosion from heavy rainfall, evapotranspiration, infiltration and groundwater recharge and runoff into streams [6,7]. The WES are classified in different classification schemes (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA), the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) or the Common. Sustainable forest management is recognized by the scientific community as one of the key elements in providing
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