Altépetl Bienestar — Mexico City's Payments for Ecosystem Services in the Suelo de Conservación

Mexico City's Suelo de Conservación covers more than 87,000 hectares of forest, farmland and wetland that supply much of the Valley of Mexico's aquifer recharge and biodiversity, and since 2008 the city's environment ministry SEDEMA has run payment-for-ecosystem-services schemes for the rural and indigenous communities who own this land.

The programmes pay ejidos and comunidades for surveillance, restoration and conservation work on their land, aiming to protect the aquifer recharge zone while supporting community livelihoods.

Two flagship predecessors, PROFACE (2008–2018, about 105.9 million pesos a year, roughly 5,000 annual beneficiaries) and PRCSA (2010–2018, about 20 million pesos a year across 13,500+ hectares), were succeeded from 2019 by Altépetl Bienestar, which reports 36,594 direct beneficiaries over its first three years, plus a 2022 payment of more than 5 million pesos to five agrarian communities across 4,931 hectares.

The successor programme has reached tens of thousands of beneficiaries and continued multi-million-peso annual payments to conservation communities across the reserve.

A peer-reviewed policy-coherence study in Región y Sociedad found the environmental dimension of the predecessor programmes produced "limited and unclear effects" on land-use change, that beneficiaries became economically dependent on the subsidies without developing sustainable alternatives, and that payments sometimes intensified rather than resolved internal community conflicts.