How can National Forest Funds catalyse the conservation of biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services? Policy and management orientations through a comparative analysis between case studies in Costa Rica, Vietnam and Morocco.

National Forest Funds (NFFs) represent a significant funding source for the forest sector globally. Mainstreaming biodiversity in these domestic financing instruments could be an opportunity to increase financing flows for biodiversity conservation and the provision of ecosystem services. An analysis of three NFF case studies (Costa Rica, Morocco and Vietnam) enables to assess with operational examples how far they already operate on Payments for Ecosystem Services approaches. The analysis highlights these funds all have PES-like characteristics, and NFF can play a sound intermediary role in quasi-PES approaches. While several countries are in the process to establish or reform an NFF, there is a window of opportunity to mainstream biodiversity objectives in NFFs including for PES-like schemes. A number of policy and management recommendations can thus be derived from the analysis to orient the NFF design or reform towards more contributions of these funds for biodiversity conservation and the provision of ecosystem services. The article will finally draw attention on how these orientations could be applied to one of the case study (Morocco)