A National Seminar on Payment for Environmental Services was held by the Brazilian Ministry of Environment in Brasília last week (April 6 to 8). At the opening, MMA Executive Secretary Izabella Teixeira said that discussing the topic is extremely important now that the Ministry is seeking out new financial solutions capable of sustaining a long-term environmental policy.
"Discussing payment for environmental services is part of the Ministry's efforts at a new financial engineering - one which assures greater funds, lower operational costs and more money for projects, and a system which allows us to advance in a public environmental policy which is more contemporary and closer to society's needs", she said.
According to MMA's Secretary of Biodiversity and Forests, Marcia Cecília Wey de Brito, also responsible for the seminar, "it is important that society recognizes these services and understands that, when a part of the forest is knocked down, it's not just scenery that is being lost, but also soil and water quality, as well as lands which will disappear in erosion and pollinators - without mentioning the loss in the capacity of absorbing greenhouse gases".
Those who participated in the seminar made suggestions to perfect the bill which is now passing through the Brazilian Congress for elaboration of a National Policy for Environmental Services and a National Programme for Payment of Environmental Services. They were asked to answer four basic questions made by MMA's Secretariat of Biodiversity and Forests: a definition for environmental services and of those entitled to payment for them; how to monitor the rendering of these services; how to pay for them; and where, in the immensity of Brazil, to begin the process.
One topic is especially controversial. There will surely be a lot of discussion on those who will or will not be eligible for payment: landowners who degraded their forests, or those who kept them intact, even when facing financial losses. According to UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) professor Eduardo Frickmann Young, it seems inevitable that landowners willing to recuperate areas they themselves destroyed should be paid for this - because society will need the services that will be rendered through forest recuperation.
Redes Sociais