#991 1997 · FONAFIFO (Government of Costa Rica) · Forestry / environmental policy
Costa Rica funded payments to landowners for standing forest with a gasoline tax
问题
Costa Rica had lost most of its forest and had no way to police thousands of remote landowners against clearing it
背景
Costa Rica's forest cover had collapsed from over 75% of the country at mid-century to about 21% by 1987, and much of that loss traced back to the state's own earlier policy: for decades, clearing forest for cattle pasture was treated as proof a landowner was 'improving' the land, the condition many tenure and credit rules required. By the early 1990s the government had reversed its stance on paper, but reversing the underlying economics was harder — a rancher or smallholder still made more money clearing land than leaving it standing, and Costa Rica had nowhere near enough forest rangers to monitor every remote parcel in the country.
The obvious lever, tougher logging bans and fines, asked underfunded enforcement to outrun a private incentive that ran the other way on millions of scattered hectares — the state would always lose that race. A coalition of foresters and economists at the University of Costa Rica pushed a different question through the legislature in Forestry Law 7575: instead of paying for enforcement after the fact, why not pay landowners directly, on an ongoing basis, for the one thing everyone already valued about their trees — water, biodiversity, carbon, and scenery — before they cut them down?
换别人会怎么做
Tougher logging bans and heavier fines were the standard response, asking a small, underfunded forestry service to out-monitor private land-clearing incentives across millions of scattered hectares of remote terrain — a contest the state could never win on inspection capacity alone.
他们看到了什么
A forest owner bore the full cost of not clearing it while the country captured the water and carbon free. Pay per hectare from a fuel tax, and the ledger flips without an inspector needing to catch anyone.
那一手
Starting in 1997, the newly created National Forestry Financing Fund (FONAFIFO) began signing five- and ten-year contracts with landowners for forest protection, reforestation, sustainable management, or agroforestry, paying them directly per hectare for those environmental services. The fund's core financing came from an earmarked 3.5% cut of the national fuel tax, later supplemented by water tariffs, carbon-credit sales, and hydropower company payments — converting a diffuse public benefit that no market previously priced into a line item landowners could plan a farm budget around.
为什么管用
The mechanism turns forest conservation into an ordinary transaction instead of a moral or legal demand: a landowner enrolling in a FONAFIFO contract is not asked to sacrifice income, they are offered a competing income stream that beats clearing the land, so compliance requires no monitoring beyond periodically checking that the trees are still there — vastly cheaper than policing clearing. Earmarking the fuel tax also gave the program a funding source that scaled automatically with national economic activity rather than depending on an annual budget fight, so the payments kept flowing through political cycles that might otherwise have starved a discretionary conservation line item.
值了多少
Over 18,000 families were paid across 1.3M+ hectares; national forest cover climbed from 21% in 1987 to over 50% today.
什么时候会失灵
It requires a revenue source stable and large enough to make payments genuinely competitive with the next-best land use, which gets harder as commodity prices for cattle, palm oil, or soy rise faster than the earmarked tax base; a government that can't index payments to opportunity cost will simply lose enrollees back to clearing. It also depends on secure, verifiable land tenure — you cannot pay someone for forest they cannot legally prove they own — which is why the model has been harder to replicate in countries with contested or informal land rights.
后来呢
FONAFIFO's model became the reference case cited by the World Bank, UN Forum on Forests, and the architects of the international REDD+ framework, and dozens of countries have since built their own Payments for Ecosystem Services programs on the same logic: fund conservation with an earmarked tax on the activity that most threatens it, and pay landowners directly rather than only punishing them.
资料来源
- [1]Payments for Environmental Services Program | Costa RicaUNFCCC Momentum for Change, 2015unfccc.int
- [2]Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) Program Strategy, Costa RicaConvention on Biological Diversity, 2010cbd.int