Colombia National Payment for Environmental Services Program (PSA)

Colombia's national Payment for Environmental Services Program (Programa Nacional de Pago por Servicios Ambientales, PSA) was created by Decreto-Ley 870 of 25 May 2017, upheld by the Constitutional Court in ruling C-644 of 2017, and later regulated in detail by Decreto 1007 of 2018. The Ministry of Ambiente y Desarrollo Sostenible (MADS) sets national policy, while regional environmental authorities (Corporaciones Autonomas Regionales), municipal environment secretariats and National Natural Parks administer agreements on the ground across four modalities: water regulation and quality, biodiversity conservation, greenhouse-gas reduction/capture, and cultural-spiritual-recreational services. A 2023 amendment (Decreto 1998) added a track for collective and ancestral territories.

Pay landowners to conserve paramos, forests and wetlands, working toward a 2030 national goal of 1,000,000 hectares registered.

The programme mobilised roughly COP441 billion (public and private) since 2017 across 503 projects. A sub-national implementation in Bogota — financed by the Bogota Environment Secretariat with UNDP's Biodiversity Finance Initiative (BIOFIN) — placed roughly 1,000 hectares of paramo, forest and wetland under 41 conservation agreements across 62 properties, framed explicitly as protecting the water supply of the city's roughly 7.9 million residents.

About 743,000 hectares have been registered cumulatively (74.3% of the 2030 goal). A 2024 snapshot found 157,637 hectares under 214 currently active projects, benefiting 8,771 families across 19 departments and 121 municipalities. In 2021 alone the programme reported 144,502 hectares newly conserved and 3,738 additional families enrolled, a year in which cumulative conservation (260,110 ha) exceeded Colombia's 2018-2022 National Development Plan target of 196,000 hectares by a third.

Ethnic and Indigenous participation lags far behind stated priorities: as of 2024 only 0.18% of active beneficiaries were Indigenous, attributed to a structural mismatch between PSA's individual-landowner payment logic and the collective governance of ancestral territories, only partly addressed by the 2023 decree. There is also a large, unreconciled gap between the ~743,000 hectares registered since 2017 and the ~157,637 hectares still active in 2024, implying substantial attrition of agreements over time. No independent, peer-reviewed evaluation of the national programme's environmental outcomes was identified.