Abstract:

Payments for Environmental Services (PES) has gained increasing attention in Vietnam over the last 10 years. Altough not originally designed to address poverty reduction. PES is expected to have a possitive impact on poverty as many Environmental Services (ES) providers in the tropic are poor. This brief clarifies the concept of PES and explains the differences of PES and non - PES schemes. It also explains how pro- poor PES is possible in Vietnam, outlines major constraints of PES and describes future steps required for pro-poor PES to succeed