The People and Nature Reconciliation (PanNature) held a workshop in Hanoi on July 24 to discuss the conditions and factors to promote forest restoration as well as the role of stakeholders in these issues.
Overview of the workshop
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Floods also caused landslides at banks of rivers and streams with a total length of hundreds of meters and are at risk of further landslide. Dozens of infrastructure and electricity works were damaged, Dung added.
Besides natural phenomena, deforestation is often considered one of the causes contributing to these losses. Therefore, forest protection and restoration are the important tasks that should be paid attention to by ministries, branches and localities, Dung emphasized.
Dr. Tran Lam Dong, director of the Silviculture Research Institute under Vietnam Academy of Science and Forestry, said that Vietnam’s total forest area is 14,415,381 hectares in 2017. Of the sum, there are 10,236,415 ha of natural forests and 4,178,966 ha of plantated forests with a national coverage of 41.45%.
With this number, the total forest area increased slightly compared with the number of 14,377,682 ha and the coverage of 41.19% in 2016. However, natural forests decreased 5,726 ha compared with the area of 10,242,141 ha in 2016.
Meanwhile, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD)’s statistics, among the 10,242,141 ha of natural forests in 2016, there were only 8,839,154 ha of timber forests, the remaining areas were pure bamboo forests, mixed forests and coconut forests. Of the 8,839,154 ha of natural forests, only 8.7% were rich forests, Dong said.
In addition, the results of the multi-year assessment show that although Vietnam’s total forest area has increased from 2004 to 2016, the protective forests have experienced the greatest negative change in the area of the three forest types, with average area reduction of about 2% per year, Dong stressed.
A report in 2012 by the Center for International Forestry Research 1 said that Vietnam is at the end of the forest evolution curve, that is, although forest coverage has increased over the past two decades, the quality of forests has declined, Dong added.
The program of making bare land and bare hills green is being implemented in order to protect the existing forest areas, promote regeneration and forest restoration, restore two million ha of protective forests and specially-used forests, and support new plantations of three million hectares of production forests, Dong stressed.
Dr. Nguyen Lan Chau from the Institute of Meteorology, Hydrology and Climate Change made remarks that the area of forest depletion is increasing. Even with new plantations, the density of forest trees is generally reduced. This result shows that increasing the forest area with new afforestation programs is not enough to restore ecosystem functions and services, Chau said.
MARD has been tasked to ensure that 15% of the degraded ecosystems will be preserved and protected; especially, the specially-used forest system will be added 100,000 ha by 2020, Chau said.
Among the issues discussed, the role of Vietnamese government and people comes to spotlight. “In order to restore the natural forests in the cheapest way and increase the ability of promoting natural forest restoration, not only the forestry sector can solve, but also the government and people have to join hands," Deputy Director of PanNature Nguyen Viet Dung told Hanoitimes.
