Sustainable Forest Management Learning Visit (May 2017, Hanoi, Vietnam)

 
The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH has been commissioned by the German Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB) to implement the project “Forest and Climate Protection Panay Phase II” (ForClim II). The overall project objective is: The Central Panay Mountain Range with globally significant biodiversity is protected and natural resources in the adjacent areas are managed and used by the local communities in a sustainable and climate friendly manner.
The island of Panay, the westernmost major Visayan island, ranks sixth in size among the Philippines’ more than 7,000 islands with a relatively intact forest area of about 50,000 hectares. The project supports the sustainable use of natural resources by local communities in the buffer zones for biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and poverty alleviation. However, unclear land use rights, open access to forests, and lack of involvement of local communities in sustainable forest management practices exacerbate deforestation and hinder forest rehabilitation efforts. Thus, the project strives for provision of security of land tenure to local government units, people’s organizations, and individual households as a precondition for sustainable forest management.
In order to promote an understanding of the importance of land tenure security in sustainable forest management, the project would like to show staff from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) examples where security of land tenure has enabled sustainable forest management and contributed to the livelihood of the local communities and biodiversity conservation.
In the early 1990s, Vietnam started decentralizing its forest sector to improve efficiency and sustainability and to expand economic opportunities for forest-dependent people. Vietnam can demonstrate successful examples of sustainable forest management based on more than 2 decades of experience. This provided the rationale for the learning exchange visit to Vietnam. This learning exchange aimed at demonstrating the importance of land tenure (red/green book) for sustainable forest management and the related success of plantation and forest management. It also covered how livelihood of local communities benefits from sustainable forest management through timber processing. Furthermore, the role of the Vietnam Administration of Forestry (VNFOREST) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development as well as enabling legislation were clearly demonstrated. And lastly, the impact of sustainable forest management on biodiversity conservation and disaster risk reduction was demonstrated.