Modeling spatial diversity: A forest-site selection tool for the Costa Rican program of Payments for Environmental Services (PES)

Abstract

This presentation describes research to address problems with the current setup of Costa Rica's PES program. The budget is too small to cover all the priority areas; the subsequent use of random selection reduces the delivered benefits because it does not consider the relative value of specific sites or probability of forest loss. Fixed payment amounts also do not account for variable opportunity costs, and thus decrease cost-efficiency.