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 surrounding the built-up city. It supplies much of the aquifer recharge and biodiversity for the Valley of Mexico, and since 2008 the city's environment ministry, SEDEMA, has run payment-for-ecosystem-services schemes for the rural and indigenous communities (ejidos and comunidades) who own this land.

Two flagship programmes, PROFACE (2008–2018, roughly 105.9 million pesos per year, about 5,000 annual beneficiaries) and PRCSA (2010–2018, roughly 20 million pesos per year, 6 community agrarian nuclei covering 13,500+ hectares of ecological reserves), paid residents for surveillance, restoration and conservation work. Since 2019 they have been succeeded by Altépetl Bienestar, which reports 36,594 direct beneficiaries over its first three years; a related 2022 payment allocated more than 5 million pesos to five agrarian communities across 4,931 hectares.

A peer-reviewed policy-coherence study in the journal Región y Sociedad found the environmental dimension of PROFACE and PRCSA 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 conflicts within agrarian communities. The programmes show both the scale a city-funded PES scheme can reach and how hard it is to prove its ecological impact.

Read the full analysis: https://sedema.cdmx.gob.mx/comunicacion/nota/beneficia-sedema-13-mil-habitantes-del-suelo-de-conservacion-en-la-ciudad-de-mexico-para-2022