29 June – 01 July 2009

The ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity (ACB), the Asian Development Bank-Environment Operations Centre (ADB-EOC), the Asia Regional Biodiversity Conservation Program (ARBCP) and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) are jointly organizing a workshop on 29 June to 01 July 2009 in Bangkok to catalyze and support development and application of payment for environmental services as a policy tool for achieving national urban and rural economic development targets.

Entitled Southeast Asia Regional Workshop on Payments for Ecosystems Services (PES): Incentives for Improving Economic Policy, Biodiversity Conservation, and Natural Resource Management target Performance, the workshop is proposed to be the first in a series of workshops that will support South-East Asian and other countries to take the necessary steps to create and/or strengthen PES legal and policy enabling conditions.

These workshops will be implemented to build on and share practical experiences in developing sustainable finance, legal, and policy enabling conditions and mechanisms that will secure and support national and regional economic development targets in ASEAN and the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS).1 The series of workshops will also work to:
1. identify more specific capacity-building needs for supporting PES enabling policy at the national level, and
2. facilitate and mobilize regional institutions to support countries in addressing these needs.

The proposed workshops will be carried out to mobilize government, civil society, and the private sector to develop finance, legal, and policy mechanisms and related expertise and skills that will sustain national and international investments to conserve biodiversity, water regulation, soil conservation, carbon offsets, aesthetics, and marine and wetland related ecosystem values within and outside protected areas in the targeted land and seascapes. While all of these types of PES mechanisms can be established, the application of each one is currently limited in the extent to which it can be applied to meet policy environmental and economic policy objectives by differing sets of biophysical, market, policy and cultural conditions.

The development of regional hydropower systems, roads, and large-scale tourism infrastructure, mining, and plantation agriculture ventures pose site-specific challenges to areas that provide and/or are supported by environmental services. In most cases, these areas serve as critical habitat to globally significant endangered, endemic and wide-ranging species that are associated with ecosystem connectivity and habitat functions that sustain the highest levels of ecosystem services values for water regulation, soil conservation, carbon offsets, and aesthetics. Without development of sufficient, tangible economic incentives to mitigate economic pressures, fragmentation of natural landscapes, large losses of habitat and ecosystem functions, further deterioration of environmental services, and increased costs to both rural and urban economies are expected.
Strengthening emerging environmental services markets offers great potential for addressing such issues. Viet Nam is the first ASEAN country to develop a pilot PES policy. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, several government agencies, and the ARBCP are currently supporting pilot policy and field based activities under which sufficient financial incentives are being generated to decrease the costs of providing water and electricity to support urban development targets. The actions taken create incentives to protect and expand forest cover to achieve national forestry and biodiversity habitat conservation targets.

The rural poor will benefit under these model actions. The programme is expected to increase household wealth measured in assets and incomes, by between 25 to 350 percent for over 5,000 families in Viet Nam. The programme has trained over 2,000 governments and rural stakeholders in PES and activities related to sustainable forest management and marketing and selling of value-added forest products. Through these activities, the ARBCP has developed lessons learned that can be examined, publicized and shared to inform others in Viet Nam and Southeast Asia who wish to develop sustainable finance mechanisms to reduce poverty, support urban development, and conserve forests, wetlands, marine, and agricultural ecosystems, biodiversity, and other natural resources at the landscape scale.

Several ASEAN governments are leading proponents of international payments for REDD, and have a specific interest in establishing equitable and effective PES mechanisms at the national level. Despite these remarkable first steps, at this point, PES markets are not well developed or broadly understood in Asia. Achieving landscape level targets at broad spatial scales require careful attention to local concerns through participatory PES mechanism design, implementation, monitoring, and related capacity-building approaches.

This first workshop will largely focus on sharing lessons learned and examining issues emerging from the Vietnamese pilot PES policy and associated pilot site activities. Other country presentations will be made to update on the approaches and status of other national policy developments in Cambodia and Indonesia and on additional global and regional experiences. These presentations can serve as reference points for thinking about how to start up and/or move forward with on-going activities to support the development of PES markets.