Payments for Environmental Services: work that generates abundance and sows life!

By keeping the forest alive, Indigenous peoples, quilombolas, riverine communities, and traditional communities provide essential services for all of us: environmental services.

With their agricultural systems, these communities have been generating food and abundance for hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of years, contributing to species diversity, preserving the forest, taking care of water, and regulating the climate.

If service is work and environmental is nature, the agricultural systems and knowledge of Indigenous peoples and traditional communities are the foundation for building policies, programs, and projects for Payments for Environmental Services (PES).

Payments for Environmental Services (PES) allow us to recognize and compensate communities for their conservation work.

In Brazil, Law No. 14,119 of 2021 defines Environmental Services as “individual or collective activities that support the maintenance, restoration, or improvement of ecosystem services,” while ecosystem services are “significant benefits for society generated by ecosystems, in terms of maintaining, restoring, or improving environmental conditions.”

And isn’t this the fruit of the ways of life and work of traditional peoples and communities?

Credits:
Produced by: Instituto Socioambiental (ISA)
General Direction: Jeferson Camarão Straatmann and Ana Amélia Hamdan Gontijo
Production: Cama Leão
Direction and Animation: João Maia
Executive Production: Maica Alves
Coordination: Natalia Rodrigues
Art Direction and Illustrations: Davis Sousa and Mariana Abasolo
Script: Ana Paula Anderson
Editing: Erik Vesch
Narration: Elisângela Baré
Soundtrack: Siba
Partnership: Observatory of Sociobiodiversity, Origens Brasil Network
Support: Rainforest Foundation Norway