Morocco ANEF Compensations pour Mise en Défens — National State Forest Deferred-Grazing PES

The Compensations pour Mise en Défens (CMD) is Morocco's foundational payment-for-ecosystem-services instrument, established by ministerial decree on 30 June 1999 and brought into force on 21 March 2002 under the Haut Commissariat aux Eaux et Forêts (now the Agence Nationale des Eaux et Forêts, ANEF). Under the CMD, the state pays rural communities organised into formally constituted pastoral associations or cooperatives to refrain from exercising traditional grazing rights on degraded state forests undergoing plantation or natural regeneration, financed through the National Forest Fund (Fonds National Forestier), which draws on taxes on commercial forest product revenues.

The programme aims to allow degraded state forests to regenerate — notably the Mâamora cork-oak forest east of Rabat, one of the world's largest natural cork-oak forests — while protecting the Sebou River watershed and reducing soil erosion in a semi-arid landscape.

In the Mâamora forest, approximately 15,453 hectares (76% of the targeted area) were placed under CMD contracts, affecting an estimated 29,000 households and 150,000 individuals across the roughly 132,000-hectare Mâamora management unit, with nearly 20 pastoral associations formally constituted there.

Compliance improved measurably: recorded forest violations (procès-verbaux) in the area declined from 796 in 2007 to 505 in 2008. The CMD is also reported to contribute to watershed protection for the Sebou basin and to soil erosion reduction; Morocco's forests overall are valued at approximately €1.7 billion per year in ecosystem services nationally.

The CMD is described as the first nationally scaled, legally grounded PES mechanism in the Arab world and a rare documented case from the MENA region, though no independent, quantified evaluation of its ecological outcomes (beyond violation counts) was found in the cited literature.