Wednesday, 23 October 2024.
Payment for Environmental Services, also known in Brasil by the acronym PSA, is a financial mechanism to remunerate rural producers, family farmers and settlers, as well as traditional communities and indigenous peoples, for environmental services provided on their properties that generate benefits for the entire society. This is the definition contained in the Environmental Education Portal of the Secretariat of Environment, Infrastructure and Logistics of the States of São Paulo, Brazil.
Sanctioned at the beginning of 2021, after approval by the National Congress at the end of the previous year, this is Law No. 14,119/2021, which you can read (in Portuguese) by clicking on the image below.
It is worth highlighting that there are already similar previous initiatives at state level.
The new federal law defines 4 types of ecosystem services:
provision services: water, food, wood, fibers and extracts, among others, such as environmental goods and products used by humans for consumption or commercialization;
support services: nutrient cycling, waste decomposition, related to soil fertility, pollination, seed dispersal, control of pests and potential vectors of human diseases, protection against ultraviolet solar radiation, maintenance of biodiversity and genetic heritage, in short, those who help maintain the perpetuity of life on Earth;
regulatory services: carbon sequestration, air purification, moderation of extreme weather events, maintenance of the balance of the hydrological cycle, mitigation of floods and droughts, control of critical processes of erosion and slope sliding, that is, those that help to maintain the stability of ecosystem processes;
cultural services: recreation, tourism, cultural identity, spiritual and aesthetic experiences, intellectual development, among other non-material benefits provided by ecosystems.
We continue tomorrow, with more details about the PSA and commenting on why this Brazilian policy has not yet fully worked since January 2021.
