Cantareira Water Producer Programme — Payments for Watershed Restoration (São Paulo, Brazil)

In 2004 Brazil's national water agency (Agência Nacional de Águas, ANA) designed the Water Producer Programme (Produtor de Água) as the country's first scheme to channel statutory watershed-committee water-use charges into payments for forest restoration, later implemented with The Nature Conservancy Brasil in the Cantareira system's Joanópolis and Nazaré Paulista catchments (Piracicaba, Capivari and Jundiaí — PCJ — basin), an area of roughly 2,898 ha across 125 rural properties.

Between 2008 and 2015 the pilot signed 41 PES contracts with landowners, paying US$6.25 to US$31.25 per hectare per year to maintain and restore native forest. The contracts delivered forest-landscape-restoration practices on 342.4 ha in total — 64.2 ha of riparian forest restoration, 90.8 ha of soil conservation and 187.4 ha of forest conservation — equivalent to 39% of the project's original hectare target, with landowner recruitment cited as the main constraint; only about half (US$49,250) of the funds set aside for landowner payments had been disbursed by project end, and spending on planning, implementation and monitoring ran roughly twelve times higher than the PES payments themselves.

A peer-reviewed World Resources Institute/TNC natural-infrastructure analysis separately found that restoring 4,000 ha across the wider Cantareira catchment could cut sediment loads by roughly 36%, delivering an estimated 28% return on investment for the water utility SABESP through avoided treatment costs. The Cantareira system supplies close to 15 million people across the São Paulo and Campinas metropolitan regions, which suffered a severe water crisis in 2014–15.

The pilot's modest contracted area relative to its target, and the high overhead-to-payment ratio, are honest limitations documented in the peer-reviewed literature; even so, the underlying ANA model has become a template replicated by dozens of Brazilian municipalities, including the well-known Extrema Conservador das Águas programme.

Read the full analysis: https://www.scielo.br/j/ambiagua/a/D8mkFD5JSCYjckRjtfxbTCL/?lang=pt