摘要：Payments for ecosystem services are becoming popular components in strategies to conserve
ecosystems and biodiversity, but their effectiveness remains poorly documented. Here we present
counterfactual-based evidence on the conservation outcomes of the pilot stage of Peru’s National
Forest Conservation Program (NFCP). The NFCP provides direct payments to indigenous
communities in the Amazon, conditional on avoided deforestation and the adoption of sustainable
production systems. Using a spatially explicit quasi-experimental evaluation design, we show that the
payment scheme has achieved only small conservation impacts, in terms of avoided deforestation.
Counter-intuitively, these materialized largely on land not enrolled for conservation, due to spillover
effects. Conservation effects on contracted land were negligible because communities were not chosen
according to high deforestation threats, and they self-enrolled low-pressure forest areas for
conservation. Occasional non-sanctioned contract incompliance contributed to these outcomes. We
highlight implications for the design and implementation of up-scaled national conservation
programs. Methodologically, we demonstrate the important role of choosing the appropriate spatial
scale in evaluating area-based conservation measures.
