Croatia's Forest Public Benefit Function Fee (Naknada za Općekorisne Funkcije Šuma)

Croatia's Forest Public Benefit Function Fee (Naknada za Općekorisne Funkcije Šuma, OKFŠ) is a statutory levy, first introduced in the 1983 Yugoslav Forest Act and re-adopted in Croatia's own 1990 Forest Act, paid annually by companies and self-employed people above a revenue threshold. Revenue is ring-fenced for karst-forest management: about 1.14 million of Croatia's 2.68 million hectares of forest (43%) sit on karst terrain, largely in Istria, Lika and Dalmatia, where trees are too small and scattered for commercial timber income, leaving fire prevention, erosion control and biodiversity as the forests' main value.

A 2016 case study for the European Commission's DG Environment documents how the fund is spent: in 2015, roughly 80% went to forest restoration, 10% to demining, 5% to firefighting infrastructure and 5% to forestry science.

Before the fee existed, Croatian karst had only 58 km of forest passages usable for firefighting access; by the end of 2016 this had grown to 7,065.61 km of forest-road-linked passages plus 984.42 km of dedicated forest roads and 184 monitoring posts. Since the post-war period, the fund financed demining of 52,631 hectares of mined forest (out of 234,000 ha originally affected), with €52.5 million invested from the fee between 2005 and 2015 alone. However, the fee rate has fallen repeatedly under business-lobby pressure — from 0.07% of company revenue at introduction to 0.015% since April 2024 — and revenue fell accordingly, from €63.88 million in 2010 to €24.66 million in 2015.

The case study is candid about limits: environmental effectiveness is 'significant but not measurable' beyond the firebreak and demining figures, public opinion of the fee is poor (it is widely criticised in Croatia as a 'parafiscal tax'), and its funding base has been repeatedly eroded by rate cuts driven by industry lobbying rather than evidence of reduced need.