How can National Forest Funds catalyse the provision of ecosystem services? Lessons learned from Costa Rica, Vietnam, and Morocco

National Forest Funds (NFFs) represent a significant funding source for the forest sector globally. Integrating biodiversity in these domestic financing instruments could be an opportunity to increase financing flows for biodiversity conservation and the provision of ecosystem services. In this paper, we analysed three NFF case studies (Costa Rica, Morocco, and Vietnam) in order to assess, with operational examples, if and to what extent NFFs already operate on Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) or PES-like mechanisms. The analysis highlights the fact that all the evaluated NFFs have PES-like mechanism characteristics and that NFFs could play a relevant intermediary role between ecosystem services providers and buyers. While several countries are in the process of establishing or reforming NFFs, there is a window of opportunity to mainstream biodiversity objectives in NFFs, including for PES-like schemes. We also derived policy and management recommendations from the analysis with the aim of supporting the design or reform of NFFs, considering biodiversity conservation and the provision of ecosystem services objectives. The article finally draws attention to how these orientations could be applied to one of the NFF case studies, i.e. Morocco.