From November 22 to November 30, Consultive and Research Center on Natural Resources Management conducted community meetings in Nam Dong and A Luoi districts. This is an activity within the socio-economic research package of the FTViet project. The meaning of community meetings is to find out what motivates the community to participate effectively in natural forest management and protection.
At the focus group sessions, members of the research group, together with the locals, discussed the status of management and protection of natural forests, the benefits of natural forests, the difficulties and challenges facing the local communities, and making recommendations to improve the effectiveness of natural forest management and protection.
As a result of 12 focus group meetings, the research team briefly noted some of the issues in managing and protecting natural forests of communities as follows:
All communities are aware of the importance and advantages of natural forests that bring about economic benefits (payment policies for forest environmental services, income from non-timber forest products), environment benefits (protection water resources; preventing landslides, flash floods; “air conditioners”, etc) and social benefits (creating more jobs and income from forest protection, raising awareness of natural forest protection supported by projects. ..);
Communities do not have the right to handle violations taking place in forest areas under management and protection. This makes communities not active and autonomous in activities of managing and protecting natural forests;
The community has not truly understood the rights and obligations that go in hand with the current legal framework, so the forest recipients are almost not confident enough and are not motivated to manage and protect the allocated forests. This is why community involvement as a forest owner is quite lackluster.
It is necessary to enhance the effectiveness of the coordination mechanism between the local community and relevant agencies in the management and protection of natural forests.
Develop livelihood models in accordance with the culture and practices of the local community, to improve the income of the local community and reduce the dependence on natural forests.
Below is some other pictures from the activity
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