In 2010, the Government of Vietnam established a national Payment for Forest Environmental Services (PFES) mechanism. To date, the PFES program has mobilized more than USD $400 million to forest owners as financial compensation for maintaining existing forests. Payments are made into centralized and provincial funds by hydroelectric power plants, utilities, industrial water users, and eco-tourism operators. Payments are then distributed to forest owners, including households, groups of households, communities, and national parks. A recent study in Lam Dong province indicates that Vietnam’s PFES program does improve forest cover, forest quality, and livelihoods, but there is no comprehensive data on the effectiveness of PFES across Vietnam. With funding from USAID/Vietnam, Winrock International is working with the Vietnamese Protection and Development Fund (VNFF) to develop frameworks, processes, tools, and guidelines for a national PFES monitoring system that will help VNFF, provincial funds, and the forest management board better understand how the PFES program impacts forest cover, forest quality, and socio-economic development.
Results/Conclusions
The presentation will discuss initial results from piloting PFES monitoring systems in Thanh Hoa, Son La, and Lam Dong provinces between September 2018 and December 2019. Pilots of the PFES monitoring system resulted in a series of lessons learned. 1) Political will: it is essential that stakeholders at VNFF understand the value and utility of collecting comprehensive monitoring information. Through a series of meetings, workshops, and demonstration of the utility of existing data, VNFF staff are now committed to improving PFES monitoring. 2) Data infrastructure: Lack of guidance and existing manual data entry inhibited use of data for decision making. To address this, Winrock International and VNFF developed guidelines for collecting and managing data and VNFF used a grant from Microsoft to develop and pilot a data management platform integrating data collection and reporting to facilitate the rapid availability of data. 3) Improving data quality: Vietnam has a variety of agencies involved in collection and management of forest-related data including the Forest Protection Department, Forest Management Boards, and protected areas. Due to bureaucratic hurdles, data was not consistently shared. To address this, Winrock worked with Thanh Hoa province to pilot coordination on PFES related data and geospatial analysis. In addition, the availability of forest owner data is inconsistent. Through the monitoring process, VNFF continues to improve data verification on forest ownership and area.