Week 2 (the honeymoon period is over and work is on)

A picture with Dean (extreme left)
and Dung (extreme right)

Things are picking up at work. We started yesterday with a presentation by Dean Current (our adviser) on Community Forestry Management. This was very informative and useful, especially for me because of my limited background in natural resource management. He mentioned that the theory behind this is the idea that there is some value that forests represent, that needs to be valued and conserved. Different forms of enterprises in natural forest management include: timber enterprises, Non Timber Forest Enterprises, PES, REDD+ and eco-tourism. We have come across most of these already and it will be interesting to learn more.

We spent the rest of the day with Dean and Dung Ngo from CORENARM, hashing out our final project plan. We have been going a little bit back and forth on this but now it seems like we have two interlinked projects to work on.

We need permissions for field visits and to travel to other provinces to conduct interviews and surveys. At the moment, both are in process. Dung outlined resources we should start reading and gave us a lot of presentations and documents to read (many were in English but some of the key presentations were in Vietnamese). He requested another CORENARM staff, Anh, to spend some time today translating the presentations for us.

Anh translating for us
with a makeshift pointer

Today was all about translation. We spent several hours with Anh from CORENARM graciously translating fairly long presentations about PES in Vietnam and Thua Thien-Hue for us. It was very, very useful. As well as an intensive process. As Anh said that most staff could have translated but not everyone has background in PES. He shared with us his comments and opinions and that was very helpful. I started replacing the presentation text with the translated text and I think this will be a good resource to refer to. We spent some time understanding the so far unclear K coefficient and how it is calculated - this was something that we had spent quite some time puzzling over. Essentially the payments are calculated based on area of forest X fixed payment amount per area unit X K coefficient. The K coefficient takes into account the kind of forest, how easy or difficult it is to take care of it etc. We also discussed how PES or rather PFES (Payment for Forest Environmental Services) implementation is shaping up in Thua Thien-Hue, which organizations are the main buyers, what is the area covered, what are the amounts generated. He shared the example of PFES in Lam Dong, which was one of the first provinces where it was started and is one of the best examples currently in Vietnam. 

During Dean's presentation

One of the more interesting things that we learned was how that even as communities may be protecting and managing forest lands, they only get paid if their watershed area is in a region where a hydropower company or some other user is paying. It seems that often community members don't understand this, especially as watershed divisions can be right in the middle of a continuous area of land. I want to understand this and land use and property titling better.

I think after today we have a lot more information. A LOT. About payments, decrees, actual implementation, challenges, sellers and buyers. Much more detail about nuts and bolts than our secondary research had allowed us to delve into. Based on our discussion yesterday, we outlined areas that need further research and split them up among ourselves. If we do work on two projects, it seems like a fair amount of work and we will have to be strategic with our time and deadlines. I think we were well-prepared for the project to change and that is the one thing that has not really fazed us. Throughout the semester we were told that project WOULD change once we reached the field and so it did and we were like, ah yes, this is what happens because real life :). This is a week of birthdays (both Meagan and Megan) and hopefully they have fun!