Protected areas conserved forests from fire and deforestation in Vietnam’s central highlands: 2001-2020

Ebright, Samuel John (2022) Protected areas conserved forests from fire and deforestation in Vietnam’s central highlands: 2001-2020. Masters thesis, Northern Arizona University.

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Abstract

Nature conservation and poverty alleviation should not be mutually exclusive. REDD+ is a United Nations initiative that was designed to facilitate payments from wealthy to developing countries for forest protection and carbon monitoring. As one of the first UN-REDD partner countries, case studies from Vietnam’s REDD+ pilot programs can give insights of common successes and failures, to guide future program success. We searched for REDD+ case studies from Vietnam in Open-Access journals and reviewed six REDD+ case studies from five provinces. We analyzed REDD+ applications funded by USAID, UN-REDD Programme and NGO operations. In our review, we found illegal logging and agricultural conversion were two major drivers of deforestation and degradation in Vietnam. Additionally, we compared payments from REDD+ to the opportunity cost to prevent deforestation from timber exploitation or agricultural land use. Although Vietnam’s REDD+ programs have garnered millions of US dollars in support, there was a large gap in funds paid to voluntary participants of REDD+, thereby compromising the long-term sustainability and support of the system. Future initiatives should take a bottom-up approach to address the root drivers of poverty, rather than a top-down approach that prioritizes carbon benefits to wealthy countries and has been plagued by elite-capture in developing nations. Knowledge co-production with local and indigenous communities can improve the success of REDD+ projects by including marginalized and vulnerable communities. As a biodiversity hotspot with ~40% forested land area and 290 protected areas, Vietnam is a global conservation priority. Vietnam’s forests have faced a complex history of change, including anthropogenic impacts from warfare, development, and global warming. Vietnam is one of few tropical countries to reverse trends in forest loss, has shown a net gain in forest cover since the 1990s, and was one of the first countries to take part in UN-REDD programs. However, a considerable amount of Vietnam’s forest gain has been from plantation forestry, as Vietnam’s policy has promoted economic development to support the population. Natural resource intensification, expansion, and residential development in the historically agrarian Central Highlands region has favored forest conversion to croplands and timber plantations. We selected a key region of the Central Highlands to ask four questions in our study: (1) How has forest cover changed in the Da Lat Plateau from 2001-2020? (2) How has fire affected the same landscape? (3) How are forest loss and fire linked spatially and temporally? And (4) how do these patterns vary between areas with legal protection status and those without? To answer these questions, we integrated the Global Forest Change (Hansen et al., 2013) and FIRED VIETNAM datasets (Balch et al., 2020; Mahood et al., 2022) to investigate forest cover change, fire, and fire-linked deforestation in the region from 2001-2020. Our study area is 1,524,783 ha near the Da Lat Plateau and roughly equivalent areas of legally protected areas (802,791 ha) and surrounding landscape (721,992 ha) without formal protection status. We used five spatial categories for analysis: Cat Tien National Park, Bidoup Nui-Ba N.P., Dong Nai Biosphere Reserve, the total area of smaller protected areas, and the land matrix outside protected areas. Between 2001 and 2020, 3,794 fires burned 132,216 ha (8.7% total area), and 208,356 ha of deforestation occurred (13.6% total area). Nearly half of all fires overlapped with forest loss in the same year, but fire-linked deforestation only accounted for 6,692 ha, 3.2% forest loss, and 0.4% of the study area. Fifty-four percent of fire-linked deforestation occurred in natural forests and 46% in plantations. Fire ignitions were almost exclusively in the regional dry season, December to April. Long-term climate data, 1971-2020, showed statistically significant increasing trends in minimum, mean, and maximum temperatures. However, the total area burned does not show significant increasing trends between 2001-2020 or from 2001 to the peak in 2010. Between 2001 to 2020, 70% of fires, 57% of forest loss, and 74% of fire-linked forests occurred outside formally protected areas. Overall, protected areas in the Central Highlands have effectively achieved national and international conservation goals, while adjacent land use and land cover change contributed to Vietnam’s development.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Publisher’s Statement:	© Copyright is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the Cline Library, Northern Arizona University. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.
Keywords:	Vietnam; Deforestation; REDD+; United Nations; Forest conseervation
Subjects:	S Agriculture > SD Forestry
NAU Depositing Author Academic Status:	Student
Department/Unit:	Graduate College > Theses and Dissertations College of the Environment, Forestry, and Natural Sciences > School of Forestry
Date Deposited:	08 Jun 2023 17:30
Last Modified:	08 Jun 2023 17:30
URI:	https://openknowledge.nau.edu/id/eprint/5996

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