Valuing rainforests as Global Eco-Utilities: a novel mechanism to pay communities for ecosystem services provided by the Amazon

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SUMMARY 1. The Amazon basin is the largest fresh water and tropical forest ecosystem in the world, representing over half of all the remaining rainforest and housing one tenth of all the known species. It provides important ecosystem services (ES), both locally and globally. The indigenous and forest dwelling populations are directly dependent on the abundant services provided by the ecosystem, while the rest of the world depends on them too, primarily because the Amazon holds an extraordinarily high biodiversity and also because the forest influences the climate system by cooling the air and recycling and transporting the rainfall over a very large area. 2. However, the Amazon is a region of tension because large-scale commercial interests (including the production of food, biofuel and timber) threaten its continued functioning. Indigenous people and subsistence farmers with lifestyles adapted to abundant natural resource availability face diminishing access to resources and degradation of ES provision. The large commercial interests driving deforestation also depend on forest services for their continued profits. 3. There is no system to compensate the subsistence farmers for the loss of services and livelihoods, although potentially they are the stewards of the forest. This state of affairs exacerbates the high levels of economic inequality that characterize Brazil. The proposed project Valuing Forests as Eco-utilities therefore intends to establish a multidisciplinary international team, which can effectively articulate a coherent model for a large-scale PES system. 4. This knowledge capacity will be embedded at the grass roots level in order that forest communities can claim their rights with respect to the ES that their natural resources provide, as well as reinforcing community land tenure claims in line with State and Federal laws. 5. Whilst the urban and peri-urban poor might not be affected directly by deforestation, a large-scale reduction in ES provision would be likely to impact them through rising energy prices, since more than 70% of electricity in Brazil comes from hydo-electric power, and through other value chain effects. This project will assist in establishing the groundwork necessary for a functional large scale PES system with the potential to contribute to pro-poor policy development, and act as a model for government driven wealth redistribution in the region. 6. This project builds on the belief of Brazilian scientists, which Global Canopy Programme has helped to catalyse over the last three years, that the water cycle of the Amazon represents a major opportunity for future PES systems. In order to design an effective project we have consulted widely, assembling an international team that consists of scientists, economists and experts in community development. The funding will be mostly used to finance two major workshops, which we believe will establish the group as an influential world-leading authority, and pave the way for larger projects over the next five years. 7. We focus on the Amazonian region for this project, where the science base is especially strong as a result of a decade of intensive research by Brazilian scientists aided by the international research community, and where there is a high level of scientific expertise; however, the arguments outlined above are quite general and can be applied to the rest of the rain forest biome creating significant potential for subsequent south-south transfer.