Determining PES compliance in sectoral acts connected to forestry

One of the ways to preserve nature and ecosystems from a group of market mechanisms is a mechanism called Payments for Ecosystem Services - PES. In this paper, sectoral laws related to forestry and nature protection are analyzed to determine whether the existing legislation has elements that are similar to PES and support its implementation or are closer to the principle of “command and control”. Three acts were selected for analysis: the Forest law, the Water law, and the Environmental Protection Act. These are the three sectoral acts that are closely related to nature conservation policy, with forest and water systems being the largest suppliers of ecosystem services and the most common subject of PES schemes. The aim of this research is to find those articles of these laws that contain the basic elements of the PES definition, by using certain keywords to search for articles of the acts. Qualitative and quantitative content analysis was used for the analysis. First, keywords were identified to distinguish the articles of acts that are relevant to the research itself, and later the meaning of each article was transformed into one or more terms called “determinants”. In this way, the meaning of the articles was determined and quantified to determine if there was a number of articles that overlapped with the PES principles to some extent. In this research, we found that there are very few articles and parts of the legislation that fully support PES, and ecosystems and ecosystem services are not explicitly linked to valuation and funding. In each of the acts in the chapters related to financing, there are elements of PES and there is some form of financing of activities aimed at preserving and improving the ecosystems and the environment. The closest to the PES is the Water law. The Forest law has certain disadvantages, as funds are collected from sources that have no connection with forest ecosystems, and EPA is based on the “Polluter pays” principle and is farthest from the PES concept.