Strengthening the Voices for Mekong Forests

The project 

The Mekong region lost about 5 percent of its forest cover between 1990 and 2015. Consequently, forest communities in the region face many challenges in ensuring that they can make a sustainable living from the forest landscapes.

This project aims to enable Non-State Actors (NSA) participation in forest governance, including the FLEGT-VPA and REDD+ processes. From Preferred by Nature’s (formerly known as NEPCon) perspective, the ability to ensure efficient involvement of NSAs in these high-level processes requires an increased level of knowledge about the forest governance frameworks, the VPA process, and REDD+ strategies for the various countries. This requires thorough baseline research and the development of information and training materials that can be used to transfer knowledge to the NSAs. RECOFTC is the lead implementation partner of this project and Preferred by Nature is involved in a range of activities, from conducting research to supporting the capacity building of the NSAs.  

The geographical scope of the project

The transboundary focus of this project covers three landscapes across five countries. These landscapes are home to many forest-dependent communities, and among the most biodiverse in the region, providing a range of ecosystem services:

1. Dawna Tenasserim Transboundary Landscape (DTL) - covering Tanintharyi Nature Reserve (Myanmar) and Western Forest Complex (Thailand)
2. Northern Thailand - Lao PDR Transboundary Landscape (NTLL) - covering Doi Phu Kha National Park (Thailand) and Nam Pouy National Protected Area (Lao PDR)
3. Viet Nam - Lao PDR - Cambodia Transboundary Landscape (VLCL) - covering: 
   • Eastern Plains Landscape (Cambodia bordering with Viet Nam); 
   • Quang Nam province, Central Annamites; Kon Tum province, Central Highlands (Viet Nam bordering Cambodia and Lao PDR); and, 
   • Xe Pian and Dong Amphan National Biodiversity Conservation Areas (Lao PDR)

Project activities 

The Project will focus on the following activities (at landscape, national and regional levels):

1. Establish a Forest Governance Monitoring System (FGMS) to monitor and strengthen forest landscape governance. The Project will assess and develop effective FGMS that can build the capacity of NSAs to generate reliable information using Geographical Information Systems (GIS), along with other web-based systems and mobile technology to pilot FGMS in the Mekong countries, and particularly in the transboundary landscapes.
2. Provide capacity development for NSAs to assess and monitor forest landscape governance. This will occur through a series of participatory learning interventions so that NSAs can subsequently support, for example, the use FGMS in pilot sites in the transboundary landscapes.
3. Enhance NSA ability to effectively respond to relevant policy and governance related challenges and opportunities.

Project outputs 

As a result of this project, Preferred by Nature has developed a suite of guidance documents and templates that can help forest owners, timber traders and processors comply with FLEGT-VPA (Voluntary Partnership Agreement under EU’s Action Plan on Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade) requirements in Vietnam.

To make it easier for target audiences to identify and decide which tools to apply, we have created a short video in Vietnamese below. The video serves as an introduction to the tools and indicates when they can be used to be ready for the FLEGT-VPA requirements. The guidance can also be found in QG.09 (below).

Timber Legality Toolkit for Vietnam

The table below shows the list of tools developed by the project. These tools are available in both English and Vietnamese, please click on the relevant name to access the tools.