Official name: Pago por Servicios Ambientales (PSA), under the Forestry Law
Citation: Forestry Law No. 7575 (1996); PSA administered by FONAFIFO
Year / status: Law 7575 adopted 1996. The PSA programme has run from the late 1990s and is still open for contracts.
What it does
Costa Rica’s Forestry Law created a legal basis to pay private landowners for four named environmental services: greenhouse-gas mitigation, water protection, biodiversity, and scenic beauty. FONAFIFO, the national forestry financing fund, runs contracts for forest protection, reforestation, natural regeneration, and agroforestry. Fuel-tax revenue is a statutory funding source described by FONAFIFO.
Where it applies / status
Costa Rica, on eligible private and some other lands that enter a PSA contract. It is national law, not a regional treaty.
Documented benefits or intended effects
The intended effect is to make standing forest worth money. UNFCCC and FONAFIFO present PSA as a mechanism that pays for protection and reforestation. Costa Rica’s later forest-cover recovery had several causes: including an earlier collapse of extensive cattle ranching: so this page does not assign a hectare total or a percentage of recovery to PSA alone.
Caveats
Payments depend on the budget and on who can navigate the application. The programme can favour titled land. It is not a ban on all deforestation, and it is not a model that copies onto every country without the tax base and the cadastre.
Sources
FONAFIFO PSA page; UNFCCC Momentum for Change write-up; FAOLEX record for Law 7575.