Payment for Environmental Services in Nepal: global lessons, local reflections.

 

Payment for Environmental Services in Nepal: global lessons, local reflections.

Nepal has made significant headways in landscape conservation and sustainable resource management through various community based forest management approaches, including community forestry. While community level governance of forest has improved, there is still a limited consideration of larger ecological system, ecosystem services and externalities. In the recent years, there is an increasing appreciation of the need for accounting ecosystem services generated by land management units such community forests. An approach has been to institute some mechanisms for Payment for Environmental Services (PES) (see Box 1 for the conceptual definition widely in use). In both developed and developing countries, PES is being adopted as a means to reward upland land managers for ecosystem services generated. The idea is that the downstream beneficiaries – such as a hydro power company and municipality having drinking water projects ‐ pay for the incremental efforts of the upstream land managers towards augmenting the flow and quality of ecosystem service such as water.

Click the below citation for the full document

Ojha, H., Kotru, R., Khanal, D.R., Bhatta, L. and Paudyal, G. 2009. Payment for Environmental Services in Nepal: global lessons, local reflections. Discussion Paper. ForestAction Nepal.