Enhancing forests’ contributions to hunger elimination, poverty alleviation, environmental services and livelihood improvement is the general objective of a project funded by the Asia-Pacific Network for Sustainable Forest Management and Rehabilitation (APFNet) in Vietnam. The project, entitled “Demonstration of capacity building of forest restoration and sustainable forest management in Vietnam”, was launched by the Ministry of Agricultural and Rural Development (MARD) and APFNet at an inception workshop in Hanoi on October 27. This is APFNet’s first project in Vietnam with a total budget of nearly $500,000. The two-year project will be implemented in Thanh Son and Tan Son communes in the northern province of Phu Tho, where most of the locals are Muong and Dao ethnic people. Under the project, a series of measures will be applied to ensure the sustainable restoration and management of 50 ha of secondary degraded natural forests in the two communes.
“The success implementation of the project will contribute to combating global warming and climate change through minimizing deforestation and forest degradation as well as increasing the carbon sequestration of secondary forests,” said Nguyen Ngoc Binh, Deputy General Director of the Vietnam Directorate of Forestry.
According to APFNet General Director Qu Guilin, in recent years, due to the large-scale afforestation, the forest resources in the Asia-Pacific region have been effectively restored and the forest coverage has been gradually increased.
“However, forest degradation and deforestation are still a big problem and the capacity on forest management differs a lot in different economies,” he said.
Therefore, the implementation of this project in Vietnam will help strengthen forest management capacity and information sharing in an effort to increase forest coverage in the APEC region by at least 20 million hectares of all types of forests by 2020, he added.
Phu Tho, the destination of the project, is one of the Vietnamese localities seeing good forest restoration. In recent years, the province planted 6,000-7,000 hectares of forests annually and is expected to have around 10,000 ha covered by forest this year.
APFNet is an open regional organization which promotes and improves sustainable forest management and rehabilitation in the Asia-Pacific region.
Initiated by China and co-sponsored by Australia and the US, the establishment of the APFNet was approved at the 15th APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Sydney, Australia, in September 2007 and was included in the APEC Leaders’ Declaration on Climate Change, Energy Security and Clean Development. (www.nhandn.org.vn [1] Oct 29)
