Sven Wunder

TL;DR: Payments for environmental services (PES) have attracted increasing interest as a mechanism to translate external, non-market values of the environment into real financial incentives for local actors to provide environmental services as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: Payments for environmental services (PES) are part of a new and more direct conservation paradigm, explicitly recognizing the need to bridge the interests of landowners and outsiders as discussed by the authors, but many field practitioners and prospective service buyers and sellers remain skeptical about the concept.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors synthesize the information presented, according to case characteristics with respect to design, costs, environmental effectiveness, and other outcomes, and conclude that user-financed PES programs were better targeted, more closely tailored to local conditions and needs, had better monitoring and a greater willingness to enforce conditionality, and had far fewer confounding side objectives than government-funded programs.

TL;DR: In the literature at the interface of rural livelihood improvement and conservation of natural forests, two overarching issues stand out: (1) how and to what extent use of forest resources do and can contribute to poverty alleviation and (2) How and to how extent poverty mitigation and forest conservation are and can be made convergent rather than divergent goals as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: This work aims to demystify PES and clarify its scope for application as a tool for tropical conservation, focusing on the supply side of PES (i.e., how to convert PES funding into effective conservation on the ground), which until now has been widely neglected.