Compensanatura — Associació Sèlvans Old-Growth Forest Stewardship Payments (Catalonia)

Associació Sèlvans, founded in Girona in 2007, has since 2011 run Compensanatura: a biodiversity-offset mechanism through which individuals, companies and organisations donate to compensate for land sealed or built elsewhere by funding the protection of an equivalent area of high-natural-value forest in Catalonia.

At least 50-80% of each donation is transferred to forest owners as a direct payment for ecosystem services, structured as a purchase of 'felling rights': the owner agrees not to harvest timber in the designated stand for 15-25 years (one felling cycle), leaving it to natural dynamics.

Sèlvans has mapped roughly 30,000 hectares of candidate old-growth/high-value forest stands across Catalonia (1,304 stands, over 50 typologies) as a targeting baseline. Under a 2025-2027 grant from the Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation (part of the EU-funded CustForest/PRTR bioeconomy programme), the project is extending stewardship agreements to roughly 500 hectares of preliminary protection and 128 hectares of active restoration/preservation, of which 43 hectares involve direct ecosystem-service payments to 18-42 forest owners, with municipalities and the Catalan Government as partners.

By January 2017, with 72 individual and 47 organisational contributors, Sèlvans had preserved 42.15 hectares across 10 mature, high-natural-value forests, paying owners a documented €31,157.32 in compensation for foregone timber value.

The model has grown steadily since 2011 but remains modest in absolute area and funding compared with state-run schemes, and reported figures are largely self-published by Sèlvans and its funders rather than independently audited; a dedicated carbon-credit mechanism for mature forests is described by the organisation as still in development, not yet operational.