TITLE:
Paying for Environmental Services
AUTHORS:
Raimundo C. G. Maciel, Bastiaan P. Reydon, Jeísa A. da Costa, Gardênia de Oliveira Sales
KEYWORDS:
Extractive Reserves (RESEX), Sustainable Development, Rural Family Production, Payment for Environmental Services (PES), Amazonian Region
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Environmental Protection,
Vol.5 No.5,
April
18,
2014
ABSTRACT: The
Amazonian economic occupation over the last forty years has been extremely
harmful to the environment and to the traditional populations. One of the
strategies to overcome this difficulty, dealing with sustainable development,
is the development of productive units—starting with non-timber forest products
(NTFP)—and the Payment for Environmental Services (PES) for the residents
and/or owners of forest areas. The main problem which the literature
demonstrates is that the estimated values paid for the PES are rather high,
because they use the opportunity cost as reference, not considering the family
reproduction social cost. The main aim of this study is to provide an alternative
forecast of the value to be paid for the environmental services (PES) for the
Amazon forest, based on the real costs of the forest communities maintenance,
as based on the real economic needs of rural family production in the “Chico
Mendes” Extractive Reserve (RESEX), in Xapuri (Acre state), Brazil. It was used
a specific methodology, developed regionally, which measured and provided
indicators to evaluate and to analyze the economic evolution of those families
over the last decade. Based on the needs of family reproduction, the
calculations require that the minimum value for PES should be US$13 per
hectare, a far lower and more appropriate value than the literature’s average
propositions that is around US$50 per hectare. The present paper estimates that
the costs of the PES in the Chico Mendes RESEX would be approximately US$5,767,000
per year—taking into account the average area per family.