In 2005, civic leaders in Xalapa, Mexico, sought to curb deforestation and unsustainable farming practices in the nearby Pixquiac watershed that threatened the quality and availability of water in their city. Xalapa’s 400,000 residents relied on the watershed—a 10,727-hectare area that channeled water into the Pixquiac River—to provide almost 40% of their water supply. SENDAS, a small nongovernmental organization, created a program that aimed to ensure the long-term sustainability of the Pixquiac watershed by paying landowners to conserve and restore the watershed’s forests. The program also helped farmers adopt more-sustainable management practices and increase their incomes. By building partnerships with the municipal water commission, the state government, the National Forestry Commission, and Mexico’s largest environmental foundation, SENDAS established a sustainable financing mechanism for the program. The organization also assembled a management committee with broad representation to ensure that funds were distributed appropriately and transparently. By 2015, environmental leaders were hoping to replicate SENDAS’s success in other important watersheds across Veracruz state.

Blair Cameron drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Xalapa, Mexico, in March and April, 2015. Case published January 2016.

In 2007, the tropical forests of Marqués de Comillas, a municipality in Mexico’s Lacandon jungle, were disappearing rapidly. Poor farmers who had migrated to the region during the 1970s relied on clear-cutting the forest to open up land for agriculture, and they were cutting more and more trees every year. After 1997, the average deforestation rate accelerated to 4.8% per year from 2.7%. By 2005, only 35% of the municipality’s forested area remained. In 2007, former environment minister Julia Carabias decided to take action. Carabias and her team at Natura Mexicana, a nongovernmental organization, joined with local communities to enroll participants in the National Forestry Commission’s payments for environmental services (PES) program and find economic alternatives to clearing the forest for agricultural use. PES, which remunerated landholders who preserved their trees, immediately slowed deforestation in the areas where it was implemented. Natura Mexicana’s work in environmental education, land planning, and ecotourism development helped change farmers’ attitudes about the importance of protecting the rain forest.

Blair Cameron drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Mexico in March and April 2015. The case was funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation in collaboration with the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy program at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Case published September 2015.

In 1994, Costa Rica's new minister of the environment, René Castro, faced a difficult task. The finance ministry was planning to cut the funding of a subsidy program that had started to reverse decades of forest loss, and Castro urgently needed a new policy that would sustain the program's progress. First, Castro built a broad-based coalition to press for a revamped national forestry law. The coalition persuaded the legislature to ban the conversion of forested land to other uses and to create incentives for landholder compliance. In 1997, Costa Rica implemented the world's first countrywide payments for environmental services program, which recognized the continuing economic contribution of forests in terms of greenhouse gas mitigation, biodiversity conservation, water protection, and scenic beauty. Funded by a new fossil fuel tax, carbon credit sales, and money from companies that benefited from the forests, the program offered landowners financial incentives to preserve and expand tree cover on their properties. The program helped reduce the destruction of primary forest and encouraged reforestation of degraded land. From 1997 to 2005 Costa Rica's forest cover increased to 51% of total land area from 42%.

Blair Cameron drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Costa Rica in December 2014. The case was funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation in collaboration with the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy program of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Case published July 2015.

A former center of the timber industry in the Brazilian Amazon, the municipality of Dom Eliseu had built its economy around deforestation—much of it illegal. In 2008, as part of a strategy to enforce the country’s environmental policies, the federal Ministry of the Environment included Dom Eliseu on a list of the worst violators of deforestation laws. The blacklist cut off residents’ access to markets and credit and made the municipality the target of intensive law enforcement. To get off the blacklist, the community had to overcome a collective-action problem. The local government had to persuade the owners of 80% of private land—more than 1,000 properties—to map their property boundaries, declare the extent of deforestation, enter their properties in the state environmental registration system, and adopt more-sustainable methods of production. The municipality also had to build the capacity to take on new responsibilities for environmental protection—most important, environmental licensing, which would enable the local government to regulate land use. With support from nongovernmental organizations and the state, Dom Eliseu successfully coordinated private compliance with the national policy and left the blacklist in 2012.

Maya Gainer drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Belém and Dom Eliseu, Brazil, in September 2014. This case was funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation in collaboration with the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy program at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Case published March 2015.