The Standing Forest · Chapter Seven

The Forest That Was Paid to Stand

Ammanuel Santa Anna · ORCID 0009-0008-3244-0306

Chapter Seven of The Standing Forest: Doughnut Economics for Leaders and Households, with the Figures You Already Hold.

Abstract

This book has quoted, more than once, a sentence from Santa Anna's Ecstatic Economics that states the accounting problem at the heart of the subject: "A forest standing contributes zero. Cut it down, and GDP increases." In the 1990s a small country in Central America tried to turn that sentence over. It built a national programme to pay landowners for keeping forest standing, and for planting it back. Costa Rica's payments for environmental services, known by their Spanish initials as PSA, became one of the most studied environmental programmes in the world. They belong in this book for two reasons. The first is that they are the plainest public attempt to put the doughnut's ceiling into a ledger: to make the standing forest appear as income to the person who keeps it. The second is that they have been studied closely enough, by economists who were not their advocates, that the results can be stated with their error bars. The honest result is more modest than the legend and more instructive.

Read the PDFRead the whole bookdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989550

Cite this chapter

Santa Anna, A. (2026). The Forest That Was Paid to Stand. In The Standing Forest. Luminous Prosperity Inc. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23989550

@incollection{santaanna2026the7,
  author    = {Santa Anna, Ammanuel},
  title     = {The Forest That Was Paid to Stand},
  booktitle = {The Standing Forest},
  chapter   = {7},
  publisher = {Luminous Prosperity Inc.},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.23989550},
  url       = {https://business.hautelumiere.life/library/the-standing-forest/07-the-forest-that-was-paid-to-stand/}
}

References

  1. Pagiola, S. (2008). Payments for environmental services in Costa Rica. Ecological Economics, 65(4), 712–724. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2007.07.033
  2. Sills, E., and colleagues (2008). Impact of Costa Rica's Program of Payments for Environmental Services on Land Use. World Bank. Reported conclusion: a small but statistically significant increase in forest conserved. A quasi-experimental comparison whose result depends on the matching of enrolled and unenrolled land.

Every chapter of The Standing Forest

  1. Chapter OneThe Line on the Mapdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989543
  2. Chapter TwoThe Economy Has a Coastlinedoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989545
  3. Chapter ThreeWhere the Ring Leaksdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989546
  4. Chapter FourThe Organism and Its Habitatdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989547
  5. Chapter FiveA City Draws Its Ringdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989548
  6. Chapter SixA Government Changes What It Countsdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989549
  7. Chapter SevenThe Forest That Was Paid to Standdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989550
  8. Chapter EightHow to Know It Workeddoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989551
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  11. Chapter ElevenThe Household Ringdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989554
  12. Chapter TwelveThe Standing Forestdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989555
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The licence

Free to read, share, quote, translate and teach, non-commercially, for ever, under the Luminous Library Licence 1.0. Every other right is the Author’s. Deposited on Zenodo in the Luminous Prosperity community.