The issue of whether Payments for Environmental Services (PES) schemes in Vietnam are environmentally or financially sustainable is discussed in an article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

In many other countries, schemes are in place which provide incentives (cash or in-kind) to people to protect environmental services. In Vietnam, state-owned hydropower operations pay communities to protect watersheds, especially from illegal logging. The country has made ecosystem payments a national policy.

The program is “intended to support economic development in poor areas while protecting forest cover and supplementing state forestry budgets,” says the article. However there is little monitoring of the benefits to water quality or watershed health, so the hydropower companies participate in good faith under the belief that they are benefitting from the program.

The article says environmental experts believe PES will still not be able to eliminate the financial incentive for poor farmers such as those in Central Vietnam to log or illegally plant coffee trees in state forests. The money they earn from coffee is far higher than what they could receive from patrolling under a PES scheme.

Meine van Noordwijk, chief science adviser with the World Agroforestry Centre, explained that the shortcomings in Vietnam were mirrored in other countries. For example, China and Costa Rica have tried to regulate a wide range of ecosystem payments, but none have achieved perfect success because putting price tags on ecosystems is such a complex undertaking.

Read the full story: Paying the poor to watch over Vietnam’s ecosystem