Climate change is a phenomenon, continuously researched, documented, debated and influencial to natural resource governance policies. Mitigating both predicted and ongoing climatic changes is even more challenging especially amid varrying perceptions of and means to attaining distributive justice. The differences in the views of distributive justice go beyond mention and make the use of compensations in PES schemes even tougher. Responding to this challenge of attaining distributive justice calls for an indepth screaning of these REDD+ sites and locals' perceptions along with preferences in regards to both distributive justice and proposed compensation formats stated for PES schemes.This work relates REDD+ and PES experiences in Brazil, Vietnam and Tanzania to environmental justice principles of distribution, representation and process., and compensation formats of in-kind, cash and both in-kind and cash payments under PES.