PES in Bunyoro: Payments lead to Conservation-Research Findings show

Sometime ago, around 2008 in the heart of Bunyoro land, an idea was conceived. Does paying local communities really pay off to conserve forests? Different views were held by different people but ultimately, it needed a full scale study to show that Payments pay or they do not! This took the Global Environment Facility (GEF) together with United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) to grant some money to Uganda's National Environment Management Authority(NEMA) .Actual implementation was sub-granted and implemented by The Chimpanzee Trust. The 4 year project (2010-2014) in Hoima and Kibaale has been able to generate key findings for policymakers and the common person.

Based on the findings, the PES programme reduced self-reported forest-clearing behavior by private forest owners. Remote sensing analysis showed that there was an increase in forest cover caused by the programme. Also, private forest owners patrolled their land more and restricted others from accessing their land; the programme reinforced the sense of private land ownership.

More specifically, the project led to the following outcomes:

1. 60% of participants said the project reduced their tree-cutting behaviour.

2. Analysis of the field data suggests that the PES scheme has reduced deforestation and increased reforestation, although the overall difference was fairly small (the rate of deforestation was 1.64 percentage points lower in treatment than in the control villages).

3. Reforestation results improved over time. Natural regeneration was preferred to reforestation through tree planting.

4. The PES scheme helped reduce the rate of deforestation, and firewood collection.

The project has even received full international reporting in one of the leading United States Dailies, The Washington Post and the UNEP has effectively reported on it. A full academic paper in this regard has also been produced with leading scholars in socio-economics from The North Western University, Stanford University and the World Bank.

Many thanks to the entire Project Management Team (from the PMU to the community monitors and entire community) that was able to Implement the first pilot of its kind.