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Vietnam’s Forest Transition in Retrospect: Demonstrating Weaknesses in Business-as-Usual Scenarios for REDD+

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Abstract

One of the prerequisites of the REDD+ mechanism is to effectively predict business-as-usual (BAU) scenarios for change in forest cover. This would enable estimation of how much carbon emission a project could potentially prevent and thus how much carbon credit should be rewarded. However, different factors like forest degradation and the lack of linearity in forest cover transitions challenge the accuracy of such scenarios. Here we predict and validate such BAU scenarios retrospectively based on forest cover changes at village and district level in North Central Vietnam. With the government’s efforts to increase the forest cover, land use policies led to gradual abandonment of shifting cultivation since the 1990s. We analyzed Landsat images from 1973, 1989, 1998, 2000, and 2011 and found that the policies in the areas studied did lead to increased forest cover after a long period of decline, but that this increase could mainly be attributed to an increase in open forest and shrub areas. We compared Landsat classifications with participatory maps of land cover/use in 1998 and 2012 that indicated more forest degradation than was captured by the Landsat analysis. The BAU scenarios were heavily dependent on which years were chosen for the reference period. This suggests that hypothetical REDD+ activities in the past, when based on the remote sensing data available at that time, would have been unable to correctly estimate changes in carbon stocks and thus produce relevant BAU scenarios.

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Acknowledgments

This research is part of the research project entitled Impacts of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation and Enhancing Carbon Stocks (I-REDD+). I-REDD+ is funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Research Programme. More information can be found on: www.i-redd.eu. The research contributes to the Global Land Project (www.globallandproject.org) and benefitted from support from the Global Land Project, University of Copenhagen.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Øster Voldgade 10, 1350, Copenhagen K, Denmark

    Jeppe Ankersen, Kenneth Grogan, Ole Mertz, Rasmus Fensholt & Kjeld Rasmussen

  2. Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), UMR 220 GRED, Vientiane, Lao PDR

    Jean-Christophe Castella & Guillaume Lestrelin

  3. Center for Agricultural Research and Ecological Studies (CARES), Vietnam National University of Agriculture, Gia Lam, Hanoi, Vietnam

    Dinh Tien Nguyen

  4. NORDECO, Skindergade 23, 1159, Copenhagen K, Denmark

    Finn Danielsen & Søren Brofeldt

Authors
  1. Jeppe Ankersen
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  2. Kenneth Grogan
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Correspondence to Ole Mertz.

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Ankersen, J., Grogan, K., Mertz, O. et al. Vietnam’s Forest Transition in Retrospect: Demonstrating Weaknesses in Business-as-Usual Scenarios for REDD+. Environmental Management 55, 1080–1092 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-015-0443-y

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