Putting the field back in the field experience

We started with our field work in Nam Dong, about two hours from Hue city. Needless to say, it has been an exciting and adventurous few days. We left on Monday early in the morning - it takes anywhere between 1 - 2 hours to get there. Some highlights from our trip included: 

1. The motorbike rides to reach different communities - the landscape was mountainous, green and lovely.

2. By standing at the local post office and looking mournful and not understanding the language and pretending to not understand that they did not give prints to people, Megan and I managed to get prints of our updated surveys. The staff person then showed us out and shut the door. Politely but firmly. But it worked!

3. A LOT was lost in translation and a lot of our information is still in Vietnamese. Our poor translators, they were so helpful and their work is still not done.

4. Meagan from the bathroom: "There is a feather here" (in addition to lizard poop and other live and dead creatures). Me: "Be glad it is not attached to something." (okay so this may not be a highlight but it makes me laugh)

5. Our activity charts fell a lot (we need better quality tape next time and a better plan!)

6. Nam Dong seems to get a lot of sudden and intense downpours. Also lightning. It was really cool in the evenings and really nice!

7. Everybody knows I am Indian (by my eyes apparently :)) and at one community there was definitely some good-natured teasing and flirting.

If you have the patience and inclination for more (and pictures!), here's a quick summary of each of our days.

Preparing for our field work next week

Working breakfast during our meeting 
to finalize the survey

Most of this week and today has been spent preparing for our field visits next week. As of now the idea is to meet with officials from three departments that work in the area of forestry and meet with 12 groups in different villages. How much of this will convert into reality will only be known next week. The planning for this trip has been fairly fluid, in terms of dates, people going with us, the groups we are meeting etc etc. We have prepared our questionnaires and surveys and have gone through three rounds of reviews.

Judd Fellowship newsletter

Oh look, the blog got featured in the Judd newsletter :-) (which is one of the fellowships I got for doing the project)! Also, go visit the link and read about what other people, including MDP students in Ecuador, Jamaica and Kenya are working on over the summer!

http://global.umn.edu/funding/judd/newsletters/2014_june.html

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.

Day 4 (also the day where we go sightseeing)

Group photo!

This is, if you haven't already figured out, a relatively light week for us. Our experience can vary between 8 - 10 weeks and we are choosing to spend 10 weeks here and thus I think we are using this week mostly the way we intended to. Rather I should say I think this is a justified and sensible use of our time. I have hit the ground running for different projects in different cities (in India) and I have known and been in favor of the motivation for that. That being said, it has been a really long time since I had the chance to slowly immerse myself into a new project. I think being in a new country, where I don't speak the language at all, where our work has relevance but not the pressing immediacy of say a disaster relief project (which I have worked on), I am grateful for the opportunity to explore the city, meet with different people and treat this like a marathon instead of a sprint.

Poster

This is a poster from the Global Spotlight Grants awards ceremony about our project:

Decoding Payment for Ecosystem Services

The project we are going to work involves understanding implementation of a Payment for Ecosystem/Environmental Services (PES) model in the Thua-Thien province and Community Forestry Management. To be honest, PES is not a topic on which I had much, or rather any, knowledge when we started out.

I have spent the last few months trying to understand PES in general and PES in Vietnam. To be fair this is a topic which has a ton of resources out there. There is no dearth of articles and books to read, videos to watch and more. As a team, we also managed to focus on PES for several projects for different classes and this has been helpful because it allowed us to engage with an area where we will be working and make it count for a grade :). We focused on PES in Minnesota for an Agriculture class - the idea is to be able to adopt a compare and contrast model when we return. This also gave us a chance to interview several people including researchers at the U of M, policymakers, sellers, staff from environmentally-focused non-profits and more. We developed an outline for an e-study module for another class and that was an interesting exercise as well. While  I fully expect and am prepared for our project to change once we hit the ground, I think this work will not go waste, if only because my awareness of environmental topics is very limited.

So for anyone who is curious, PES is a model which values the services provided by different ecosystems to human beings. These can include watershed management, biodiversity, aesthetic beauty, carbon sequestration and many more. In this model, buyers/users and sellers of services are identified and a framework is set up to channel money from the buyers to the sellers. While a lot of the definitions I have come across in literature defines these as ‘voluntary transactions’, there are several mandatory models as well - for example in Vietnam it is the government that has enforced the PES model. Another thing I find interesting as a former Economics student is that this is within a market-based framework - the idea that one can value the services provided by the environment.  Valuing carbon sequestration is something that a United Nations program - Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) also focuses on and based on what I have read so far, it seems that at least in Vietnam, the long-term goal is for PES and REDD+ to converge. 

I plan to use this blog to share both what I learn from the literature and get to observe in the field in the hopes that a. it will serve as a record for me to go back to in the future and b. that it may be of interest to some of you out there!