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 and compiled into the sector's Decreto Único Reglamentario 1076. The Ministry of Ambiente y Desarrollo Sostenible (MADS) sets national policy, while Corporaciones Autónomas Regionales (regional environmental authorities), municipal environment secretariats and National Natural Parks administer agreements on the ground with landowners across four official 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.

According to MADS reporting compiled by Colombian press, the program mobilized roughly COP 441 billion (public and private) since 2017 across 503 projects, with about 743,000 hectares registered cumulatively — reported as 74.3% of the government's 2030 goal of 1,000,000 hectares. 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 program 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. A sub-national implementation in Bogotá — financed by the Bogotá Environment Secretariat with UNDP's Biodiversity Finance Initiative — placed roughly 1,000 hectares of páramo, 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.

The program's own figures carry real caveats. Ethnic and Indigenous participation lags far behind its stated priorities: as of 2024 only 0.18% of active beneficiaries were Indigenous, which Colombian reporting attributes to a structural mismatch between PSA's individual-landowner payment logic and the collective governance of ancestral territories — a gap the 2023 decree only partly addresses. 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 program's environmental outcomes (as opposed to hectares enrolled) was identified; the quantitative record rests on MADS's own reporting, corroborated by independent Colombian and international press rather than third-party monitoring data.

Read the full analysis: https://www.minambiente.gov.co/negocios-verdes/programa-nacional-de-pagos-por-servicios-ambientales/