Payment for forest environmental services in Vietnam: An analysis of buyers’ perspectives and willingness

Integrated Effect of the Payment for Forest Environmental Services (PFES) in Vietnam

“…Many researchers recognized the limitations of PFES in Vietnam such as strong state involvement, poor design and monitoring of ecosystem services, less attention on market-driven factors in PFES, and poor livelihood subsidy [5,22,26]. However, their evaluations were focused on individual aspects of PFES in Vietnam such as policy factors [6], enhancing forest cover and watershed [6], equality and efficiency of PFES [26], buyer's perspectives [9] or livelihood of local community [4,12,[19][20][21]. But if looked at from a social perspective, the evaluation indicators have clearly shown a remarkable change in the awareness, attitude and behavior of forest owners in forest plantation and protection.…”

“…This assessment approach focuses on effective exploitation of society according to local characteristics, which has been highly appreciated by researchers [19-21, 28, 29]. Social efficiency has been taken into account in other works on ethnic characteristics, religion, culture and awareness of individuals [9,10,26,27] and communities [12] about the responsibility and obligation to protect forests. Meanwhile, the impacts on the environmental aspect are reflected in the fact that the payment program has protected a large area of forest and promoted forest protection activities such as managing, patrolling, and monitoring forests; reduced indiscriminate logging and deforestation; encouraged local people to protect forests, not to convert forests to other land uses as mentioned by other workers [6,13,14,25].…”

“…Scholars agree that the pilot phase's process was seemingly hasty because of the lack of rigorous evaluation and highly optimistic in forecasting an increase in revenues to $ 2 billion in 2020 [8]. Several studies before the issuance of the final Decree 99 were not reflected in the final decision [9].…”

“…As a result, the payment has not really helped people living in the forest to change their livelihood conditions. This was also one of the common weaknesses of most PFES programs in Vietnam [1,5,9,10] it is necessary to fully exploit the environmental values of the forest, especially the carbon sequestration service of the forest. Currently, the type of carbon sequestration payment has been regulated by the Government of Vietnam in the Law on Environmental Protection (2020), but the implementation has not been carried out yet [30].…”

Progress and prospects of research on forest eco-efficiency compensation

“…Some scholars also analyzed the effectiveness of forest ecological service payment programs, including the quantitative analysis of farm rental costs and compensation results, as well as the significant impact on forester enthusiasm, forest harvesting rate and coverage rate [74] . In the studies on the influence of PES on participants, foreign scholars pay more attention to whether the public is willing, the length of the contract, the payment method, the willingness and acceptance of the compensated, whether the compensation standard meets the willingness of forest conservators to receive compensation and the purchase motivation [75][76][77] , etc. One of the key points is the research on ecological compensation intention of private ownership forests and corporate forests [78] .…”