*5.3.1.2 Impact on the economic situation of households*

To examine the impacts of the PFES program on people's lives, we compared some socio-economic indicators of two groups of population participating and not participating in the PFES program in Vietnam two times before and after the PFES program taken place. The results of the comparison are shown in **Table 9**. Additionally, the percentage of poor households in the group participating in the program decreased more than in the group not participating in the program. However, the percentage of


#### **Table 8.**

*Comparison of total income and income from forests between two groups of households participating and not participating in the PFES program.*

*Integrated Effect of the Payment for Forest Environmental Services (PFES) in Vietnam DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.112900*


#### **Table 9.**

*Comparison of some socio-economic indicators between two groups of households participating and not participating in the PFES program.*

households with savings in money and jewelry of the group participating in the PFES program was lower than that of the nonparticipant group. For the percentage of households with loans in both groups participating and not participating in the PFES program, there was an increasing trend; the growth rate of the participating group was lower than that of the nonparticipating group. This once again affirms that the PFES program has contributed to improving the economic lives of households participating in the program.

#### *5.3.1.3 Impact on people's awareness of forest protection*

The results of comparing the level of awareness of forest functions between the people participating and not participating in the payment for environmental services are shown in **Table 10**.

For the supply and cultural functions, there was no significant difference in awareness between the two groups of participants and nonparticipants in the PFES program. Meanwhile, the ability to recognize the regulatory functions of forests in the forest households participating in the program is always higher than in the group not participating in the program.

In general, it can be seen that the ability to recognize the functions of forests in the participants of the PFES program was much higher than in those who did not. Specifically, the participants recognized up to 9/14 forest functions higher than nonparticipants. In which 100% of the forest's regulatory functions are recognized higher by the participants than the nonparticipants. This functional group of the forest was often more difficult to identify with the people than the other function groups. This can be explained because when participating in the PFES program, people will be trained and propagated more about the functions and values of forests, especially the regulatory functional group of forests.


#### **Table 10.**

*Comparison of ability to recognize forest functions between two groups of households participating and not participating in the PFES program.*

#### *5.3.2 Environmental impact*

#### *5.3.2.1 Forest exploitation activities*

The results of comparing the frequency of entering the forest to collect forest products of the two groups of participants and nonparticipants in the PFES program are shown in **Table 11**.

**Table 11** shows that the frequency of going to the forest of both participants and nonparticipants in the PFES program after the PFES program has taken place tends to decrease. The frequency of going to the forest of the group not participating in the PFES program was always higher than that of the participating group. Reducing the frequency of people entering the forest helps limit the exploitation of forest resources. This was demonstrated more clearly through the data on forest product exploitation of the two groups described in **Table 12**.

**Table 12** showed that most of the forest product exploitation activities of people in both participating and nonparticipating groups in the payment program for forest environmental services after 2015 decreased compared to the previous time. However, *Integrated Effect of the Payment for Forest Environmental Services (PFES) in Vietnam DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.112900*


#### **Table 11.**

*Comparing the frequency of collecting forest products of two groups of participants and nonparticipants in the PFES program.*


#### **Table 12.**

*The situation of people's forest product exploitation before and after the PFES program.*

whether this was an impact created by the PFES program needs to be considered by the fact that the rate of reduction in harvesting of forest products among those not participating in the program was much higher than that of the group participating in the program.

#### *5.3.2.2 Impact on the forest management plan*

The results of comparing forest protection and development plans of two groups of households participating and not participating in the payment program for forest environmental services were quite significant (**Table 13**). The participants in the PFES program had a higher tendency to keep and protect forests than the group of nonparticipants. Specifically, the group participating in the program had higher percentage of planning for forest protection, afforestation, and forest protection to receive payment than the nonparticipants in the group. In contrast, those who did not participate in the PFES program had plans such as transfer of management rights, agroforestry development and forest conversion for other purposes were higher than those participating in the program. Notably, the proportion of households that did not have a forest protection plan in the group of people participating in the PFES was quite low, only 5.98%. In contrast, the number in the group of people who did not participate in the program was nearly 2.5 times higher (13.38%).

In summary, the participants of the PFES program had better forest protection and development plans than those who did not participate in the program. When forest owners actively zoned and protecting forests, it was important for protected forest environmental services because when forest owners changed land use purposes, forest environmental services will also be lost. These cases will lose great social benefits, according to the analysis of Pagiola and Platais [29].

The results of the assessment of the IE of the PFES program in Ba Be have shown that the program has had obvious environmental effects; specifically, the program has contributed to promoting and improving forest protection and development activities. This result has also been shown in Vietnam's PFES programs in other regions such as Lam Dong, Son La, Hoa Binh and Thua Thien Hue [12, 17, 18, 20, 23]. In addition, the PFES program in Ba Be has contributed to changing people's perception of forest resources, helping people to be more aware of the value of forests. In the program, the elements of fairness and transparency have been paid attention to, especially ensuring equal access to the program for the poor and ethnic minorities. As a result, there were no major social conflicts or conflicts when implementing PFES programs [10–12]. However, the economic efficiency of the PFES program was not high because the average payment level was still low. As a result, the payment has not really helped people living in the forest to change their livelihood conditions. This was also one of the common weaknesses of most PFES programs in Vietnam [1, 5, 9, 10]. To overcome this,


#### **Table 13.**

*Comparison of forest protection plans between participants and nonparticipants in the PFES program.*

#### *Integrated Effect of the Payment for Forest Environmental Services (PFES) in Vietnam DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.112900*

it is necessary to fully exploit the environmental values of the forest, especially the carbon sequestration service of the forest. Currently, the type of carbon sequestration payment has been regulated by the Government of Vietnam in the Law on Environmental Protection (2020), but the implementation has not been carried out yet [30]. Promoting payment for carbon sequestration services will expand PFES users, which are mainly enterprises and industrial plants. From there, a large source of funding will be mobilized to contribute to raising the price paid per hectare of forest. Besides, the promotion of forest economic development, agroforestry models, planting medicinal plants under the forest canopy, etc., are also solutions that need to be promoted to contribute to raising incomes and improving livelihoods for forest-based communities.

### **6. Conclusion**

The proposed integrated assessment method demonstrates more detail results of payment for forest environmental services in Ba Be district, Bac Kan province, Vietnam. Economic efficiency, if simply measured by the amount of money received by forest owners according to the quality of the forest they contribute, is very small and not commensurate with their efforts [5, 22]. Many researchers recognized the limitations of PFES in Vietnam such as strong state involvement, poor design and monitoring of ecosystem services, less attention on market-driven factors in PFES, and poor livelihood subsidy [5, 22, 26]. However, their evaluations were focused on individual aspects of PFES in Vietnam such as policy factors [6], enhancing forest cover and watershed [6], equality and efficiency of PFES [26], buyer's perspectives [9] or livelihood of local community [4, 12, 19–21]. But if looked at from a social perspective, the evaluation indicators have clearly shown a remarkable change in the awareness, attitude and behavior of forest owners in forest plantation and protection. In our case study, the forest owners are encouraged to participate in forest protection work, go on forest patrols and the community's awareness in forest protection work is clearly raised. This assessment approach focuses on effective exploitation of society according to local characteristics, which has been highly appreciated by researchers [19–21, 28, 29]. Social efficiency has been taken into account in other works on ethnic characteristics, religion, culture and awareness of individuals [9, 10, 26, 27] and communities [12] about the responsibility and obligation to protect forests. Meanwhile, the impacts on the environmental aspect are reflected in the fact that the payment program has protected a large area of forest and promoted forest protection activities such as managing, patrolling, and monitoring forests; reduced indiscriminate logging and deforestation; encouraged local people to protect forests, not to convert forests to other land uses as mentioned by other workers [6, 13, 14, 25].

The proposed method applies ecosystem approaches and is based on three pillars of sustainable development, i.e., economic, social and environmental development, as done by many workers [7, 28, 29]. The use of 15 diverse evaluation criteria has evaluated in detail the effectiveness of payments for forest environmental services in many respects compared with the methods used before.

However, we realize that using 15 evaluation criteria will take a lot of time, and in many cases, the number of evaluation indicators can be reduced to suit the specific conditions of each locality. In addition, our method is still focused on locality context and the upscaling is limited such as national and global dimensions [15]. However, the simplification has to ensure the evaluation of three aspects of sustainable development such as economy, society and environment, as many workers applied in the world [7, 9, 27–29].
