THE PES SCHEMES FOR A SUSTAINABLE USE OF NATURAL RESOURCES

Generally the flows of natural resources, goods and services (climate regulation, water and air quality etc.) from ecosystems are the natural capital of the economies. Among these flows the ecosystem services, which derive from interactions between the organisms and their function within the ecosystems, are critic and in decline. The need of knowing and assess these services to realize a suitable management it is clear indeed by the negative trends of health of the biodiversity of biomes. It has been underlined the need for ecosystem accounting techniques to study the relationship between economic sectors and their dependence from ecosystem goods and services, as well as the impacts on the last ones. Many countries are being developed payment programmes for ecosystem services (PES), even if there are many definitions and types for the PES. As a consequence in the PES scheme it is possible to delineate many steps for their implementation. The first one is really to choose and clearly define the environmental goods and service and the second one has to be the identification of stakeholders involved in this programme. The following step is the economic evaluation of the specific ecosystem service and finally it has to carry out the relative “payment”, according to the type of economic and/or financial tools chosen. Each of these steps shows several issues and controversial aspects, due to many reasons. This paper analyses definitions, scope, schemes and the main actors of the PES as tool to protect the natural capital.