Background

The Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Professional Fellows Programme (YSEALI PFP) is a fully-funded exchange programme sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The programme’s theme of Sustainable Development & the Environment is administered by the International City/County Management Association (ICMA), the leading organisation of local government professionals dedicated to creating and sustaining thriving communities around the world.

Plans for the 2020 batch of YSEALI Professional Fellows were disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. While we attended virtual lectures related to our theme, many of us were disappointed by the inability to participate in the in-person exchange in the USA. Eventually, we were informed that we had two options: to either wait for a shortened version of an in-person programme, or to re-apply to another batch of YSEALI PFP. While some chose to reapply, I did not want to go through the work of submitting another application.

In March 2023, those who remained in the 2020 YSEALI batch were finally informed that the in-person programme – a two-week study tour – would take place in July 2023. ICMA organized virtual pre-departure orientations and instructed us on how to obtain our J-1 exchange visas. Our batch of 32 remaining Fellows were to convene in Washington, D.C.. We would then split into two groups, each visiting two cities related to our areas of interest. I was allocated to the group visiting Rochester, Minnesota, and Dubuque, Iowa. When I learnt that Dubuque was known for its efforts in sustainable agriculture, I told myself that this was an opportunity that I wanted to hold onto.

Locations of the two cities of Rochester, Minnesota, and Dubuque, Iowa, in the United States of America. (Source: Google Earth)

Getting to know Southeast Asia – better

 Before the trip, I thought I knew Southeast Asia fairly well enough. Yet nothing compares to having a full-day’s schedule for two straight weeks with other Fellows from Southeast Asia – wonderful people who are positive and, being true to the virtues of leadership, watch out and care for one another.

With the participants of the YSEALI study trip and its organisers.

When we missed our connecting flight in San Francisco, I felt pretty at home being straned with people from Vietnam and Laos. After all, I had done some work in these countries before and felt pretty familiar with their backgrounds – Vietnam being an up-and-coming vibrant nation and Laos, with its difficult socioeconomic circumstances. It even turned out that Sittiphone and Thin each have mutual friends with me! But it seemed like my Vietnamese and Lao colleagues were more familiar with the Burmese situation than I was. As I listened in to their conversations with Olive, I got more curious and subsequently I was able to learn, through a conversation with Olive on our four-hour bus ride from Rochester to Dubuque, more about the extremely heartbreaking and tricky political circumstances facing the Burmese. For example, all schools are closed, and the northern half of the country has no telecommunication. The civil strife is fueled a certain powerful neighbour’s interest in laying a gas pipeline across the north. In comparison, the political peace and its affordances that we have in Singapore is a true luxury.

Very jetlagged and with our carry-on luggages in tow, but no better way to miss a connecting flight than with five other young Southeast Asian leaders.

When we went sightseeing on our last day in Washington, D.C., I could not help thinking how unlikely the chances were of one Lao and one Vietnamese walking through the Vietnam War Memorial together (the Vietnam War is known as the Secret War in the Lao PDR):

Through Ricky and subsequently Julio, I learnt about Timor Leste, the new Southeast Asian nation that is so eager to grow. At Q&A with our speakers, Ricky always thoughtfully asked what lessons could be brought back to his country. As he was going to take on a role in developing business investments in his country, he also asked how more businesses could be attracted to Timor Leste. As Wei Xuan pointed out, it is quite likely that some of the Fellows will become leaders of their countries in the future. Ricky and Julio are clear examples, but there are also others whose paths are already destined (Thailand’s Manno, who was always looking out for lessons he could apply to Phuket) or who are just so brilliant and passionate in what they do (Truong, Mark, Virly, Monalisa, Sittiphone, Mentari – just to name a few from our group).

Ricky from Timor Leste looking extremely thoughtful during a presentation by the Office of Shared Prosperity & Neighbourhood Support at the Dubuque City Council Chambers.

Our group being featured in the Dubuque local newspapers.

Reacquainting with USA – and more

Fifteen years ago in 2008, I spent two semesters at the University of Virginia. Subsequently, I came back for a short visit to the east coast in 2010, but since then I learnt the most about the USA through the media.

Meet-up with Rachel, my friend from UVa – she still looks the same!

This trip reminded me of some of the values that I had been exposed to, but had somehow been buried in my psyche when I tried to conform in the Singapore public service. Speaking up, and striving. Perhaps these are associated with the uniquely American libertarian values, and I was glad that they still existed in the individuals we met the and cities we visited, despite the negative media coverage in almost the past decade. But more fundamentally they are associated with the idea of human rights, and what it is to flourish as a human being.

An apt reminder about speaking up, seen at Dubuque’s Multicultural Family Center

We were also pleasantly surprised by the emphasis on allowing for discursive spaces. During our study trip, there was plenty of time for questions and discussion (it helped that we were also a curious group). We were initially taken aback by the informality of some presentations, e.g. speakers not using any visual aids. But we soon learnt that the quality of the discussions was more important than their presentation.

A tour of Dubuque Rescue Mission garden, which supplies fresh vegetables for providing free meals to homeless men in the city.

When I was an undergraduate student in the east coast of the USA fifteen years ago, I was a little frightened by the rough and somewhat unfriendly nature of some of my interactions outside of the university setting. For example, in Washington DC’s Chinatown, I had witnessed how someone had taken a dagger out of a shop’s shelf and walked out right past the shopkeeper, without paying. When I travelled along the east coast between Virginia and New York City, service staff often seemed surly. My experience this time helped to correct that perspective. When we missed our connection in San Francisco, two young staff from United Airlines went out of their way to help us. The airline staff also tried to be cheerful and supportive of each other, when faced with a tricky customer. People were generally helpful, polite and cheerful. The same could be said of the two small cities we visited in the Midwest. I am glad to have a glimpse of the diversity of the USA.

Cindy, the assistant city manager of Rochester, made sure to welcome us well. She was very excited to have us, having hosted other Fellows under the 6-week exchange programme, including Soy (a fellow PhD-friend – what a small world!). Lauren, Rochester’s sustainability coordinator, made sure we learnt as much about the city’s sustainability initiatives in the three days we were there. We were very tired, and after the farewell dinner party at Cindy’s home, I was falling asleep on the couch while waiting for the ride back to our hotel. But it was a most beautiful experience of an American home and of American hospitality.

At Cindy’s home on our last day in Rochester.

Having previously worked as Dubuque’s assistant city manager, Cindy was excited to make sure our experience at Dubuque was its best. She arranged for us to visit the Mississippi Museum on Sunday morning and, knowing that Olive is interested in art, arranged an optional visit to the Dubuque art museum. Cory, Cindy’s successor, also made sure our learning experience was the best, but there was more a learning-by-doing component – we learnt less through lectures but by interacting with other city residents, site visits, and experiencing life (a concert at the Dubuque Arboretum and a county fair).

Excited to arrive at the county fair in our trolley bus.

I was very impressed to see so many examples of active ageing in Dubuque. The city manager, for example, wakes up at 4am every morning to walk 10km. The Arboretum is largely volunteer-run, and many volunteers are elderly retirees. The members of the Sister City Commission are seniors who meet and host visitors like us. On our final night in Dubuque, Phyllis, one of the members of the Sister City Commission, came all the way to our hotel to ask us to pass a gift to a Singaporean YSEALI Fellow whom she had hosted several years back.

Louise, a member of the Sister City Commission, is a retiree.

Another personal takeaway from the trip was the amount of dietary fiber in the food. My Vietnamese and Lao friend felt that there wasn’t enough vegetables, but it was really a lot to me! I subsequently found out that Singaporeans consume less than half of the recommended daily dietary fiber intake. Food for thought on bowel health.

A tour of the social enterprise Convivium’s neighbouhood gardens, where fresh vegetables are grown to tackle the situation of the area being a ‘food desert’, i.e. where residents have limited access to fresh foods.

When we reconvened in Washington D.C. at the end of the study tour, many Fellows were excited to take photos at major landmarks like the Capitol Hill building and the White House. I did not feel a similar level of excitement, but obliged to follow Paul and Thin on the last evening. Thin reminded me, however, that we had to make the most of our time. We may take another 15 years to visit the USA again, or maybe not ever. This congregation of events and people was indeed a once-in-a-lifetime experience to cherish.

Visiting the Washington Memorial on our last day in the USA.

Professional takeaways

The talks and the site visits were not immediately useful for my current work as a Research Fellow, and I felt that there would be more professional congruence for my work in the Centre for Liveable Cities ten years ago. Nonetheless I kept an open mind to learn as much as I could. After all, as the ICMA organisers had explained, it was impossible to organize a study trip catered to only one person’s interest. We reflected that although our experience was more touch-and-go than a 6-week immersion in one host community, we covered a lot more breadth within a shorter timeframe. I also shared some interesting takeaways with my former colleagues in PUB. These included the: Bee Branch flood mitigation project in Dubuque, and Rochester’s efforts to engage the public about sewer maintenance.

The Bee Branch flood mitigation project. Very ABC Waters-isque.

A “sponge-poo-poo” stress ball distributed to members of the public to remind them that only 3Ps – pee, poo and paper – go into the sewer; and a small but useful household tool to scrape the oil and grease on cooking pans into the bin instead of into the sewer system.

I loved learning about Rochester’s policy of in-filling in their city planning to prevent urban sprawl, and also how aware the planning team was about addressing social inequities through their work. (There is even a environmental justice census tract to help them with their planning!) Their explanation about how the Upper Midwest relies of a very robust aquifer for drinking water, but that Southern states wanted to draw from this aquifer, was fascinating from a transboundary governance perspective. So were the narratives about how the cities were doing their best to mitigate stormwater pollution, despite the less-than-valiant efforts of big agriculture. I also think that the Mississippi River offers the world a fascinating story about transboundary river management – it has a total of 29 lock-and-dam structures and, unfortunately, a dead zone at its outlet. The difference from Southeast Asia is that the states that the Mississippi flows through are under one federal government.

Making participation work: A very insightful presentation about Rochester’s Community Co-design to ensure social equity and inclusiveness in urban planning.

The Mississippi River’s lock-and-dam number 11, next to Dubuque.

My most professionally-relevant takeaway was a profound insight – though perhaps not new to other researchers – about carbon credits. In both Rochester and Dubuque, I asked whether the sales of carbon credits was under consideration, and the answers were mainly negative. Yet in our group, Monalisa is working through Fairventures to encourage farmers in her hometown of Kalimantan to plant trees for carbon credits. This juxtaposition raised an intriguing thought pertaining to climate justice – Why aren’t the more well-to-do so keen to sell carbon credits? – and perhaps more specifically the lure of money – Why aren’t the more well-to-do being asked to sell carbon credits? To be fair, though, Monalisa shared that it was challenging to convince the farmers, and there are some nature-based projects in Europe and USA that can be invested through carbon credits.

Personal growth

As all mothers can attest to, becoming a mother transforms one’s identity. Adding to that was the isolation whilst completing a PhD thesis during Covid-19. While I tried to engage with others through social media, I did have doubts about my self-worth. Starting my new position as a Research Fellow and meeting encouraging colleagues in April 2023 helped with my self-confidence, but the YSEALI study tour was the antidote I needed. When I saw other Fellows take pride in their status as a YSEALI Fellow, I likewise felt proud of being a YSEALI Fellow. When I noticed how they looked to me to ask questions and how they commented that I had a PhD, I felt reaffirmed. There can be many more successful people around in academia, but I now feel more confident in speaking up and facilitating meetings.

It was also an honour to meet Gina, the sustainability coordinator of Dubuque. She was a sceptic, a fighter and a mother – all in one person. Since starting the ‘SG Parents for Climate Action’ Instagram page, I heard many stories about other mothers who wanted to improve the living environment for their children. It was really a dream come true to meet someone like Gina. I come back being inspired to do more to safeguard the environmental future of the next generation.

Gina, the sustainability coordinator of Dubuque, sharing with us about her work and the challenges in safeguarding a healthy environment for her children.

From being pregnant while being interviewed for the YSEALI PFP to now being able to offload the caregiving duties to others because my son is now old enough, this YSEALI study tour was really, for me, at the right time and of the right duration.

Transiting at the Incheon Airport. One the left is a photo of a meal I had in May 2020, travelling from Laos to Singapore and about 10-week pregnant. On the right is a meal in July 2023, travelling from Washington, D.C. to Singapore and 2 years 8 months postpartum.

Conclusion

I’m really grateful to those who encouraged me to participate in the YSEALI study tour – especially Michelle and Haswani – given that I was considering withdrawing when our flight tickets had not been booked 1.5 weeks prior to our trip. I’m also really thankful to those at home who took over the childcare responsibilities: my husband, my parents and Yulis, and my parent-in-laws and sister-in-law. It was really a good break from the daily grind of washing, cleaning up, negotiating boundaries, chasing after… and well, all things associated with caring for a toddler.

The YSEALI trip may be an exercise of American soft power, and amidst the ever-growing China-US tensions, could be looked upon with a suspicious eye. But Tony, ICMA’s Senior Programme Manager and YSEALI coordinator, once explained that it is more important to look beyond the geopolitics and to focus on our shared humanity. As I joked with Tony when he visited Singapore last year, despite different ethnicities and culture, there is a certain universality in the challenges of getting children to use the toilet and to eat healthily.

Wise words seen on a shopfront in Rochester city.

In 2019, we had just sold our 4-room HDB flat and begun the paperwork to move to another resale HDB flat. One reason for this decision was because we hardly got any sun coming into our then-current flat. This made our laundry always smell a bit damp and moist, and hardly smelt sun-kissed.[i] When we sweated, our clothes gave off an odour despite using laundry detergent that claimed to be able to remove odours.[ii]

Then I saw a commercial for indoor clothes drying systems. Not a conventional clothes dryer, but a system where you still hang the clothes on poles in your apartment’s laundry area, and above the poles are blower fans and a UV lamp.[iii] Presumably the UV light would leave your clothes smelling sun-kissed as they hang on poles in the laundry area of your HDB apartment’s kitchen. I was shocked. Why didn’t we discover this product earlier? We might have avoided all the hassle associated with moving house. But there was another reason why I felt shocked. Why is this technology needed, to begin with?

Satellite view of the HDB block that I used to live in. (Source: Google Earth, April 2022)

Singapore prides itself for having a vision of being biophilic (i.e. having a love for nature). HDB planners incorporate greenery into new HDB estates, so that residents can be closer to a bit of nature. Yet, many recent HDB designs let light enter the balconies and living rooms, whereas the laundry area is parked at a dark and dim corner of the apartment, unseen to the passers-by’s eyes. This sort designed seemed intended to address the apparent concern that the way laundry was hung in the older designs on HDB flats made the façade look ugly. But as such, indoor clothes drying systems become necessary.

Laundry hung out on poles to dry on a sunny day, at a 40+ year old HDB flat. Beautifully practical, or unsightly? It’s a matter of perspective. (Source: Author, 2022)

Is this our understanding of having a love for nature? If we view nature as the other – the other green space, the other wild animals – then perhaps, yes. Bats and squirrels are fascinating, as long as they don’t come near or into our windows. We love nature, but only outside the confines of our house. Our house is our fortress of digital technology.

But there is another interpretation of having a love for nature, which urban gardeners will agree with. Their plants need sunlight to grow well. In growing plants in their houses, insects are inadvertently invited into their HDB flats. While it could be annoying, they accept it as how co-existence and co-dependence take place in this larger force called nature (自然界).

“Nature is time and space, andthe laws that govern them. It is the cycle of life: birth, growing-up and maturing, and death – and repeat. It is about the relationships in that space: between different lifeforms and between different physical and chemical elements. It is about the limits that these laws place on us, yet also about what these laws enable us. That is why nature is fascinating, lovely, respectable scary and empowering all at the same time.”[iv]

Having a love for only the nature that is outside our houses would seem like an incomplete love for nature. Having a love for nature means appreciating what nature has to offer to make our lives more liveable. It might sound utilitarian, but the truth is that our bodies – and societies – have co-evolved with nature for millenia (take, for example, why being in the dark makes us sleepy). For example, traditionally the Khmu people of Lao PDR believe in maximizing sunlight, especially the morning sunlight, in the house for health reasons.

A photo of a poster about the Khmu ethnic minority in Lao PDR, at Nahm Dong Park in Luang Prabang. The last paragraph is about the design of houses in traditional Khmu culture. (Source: Author, 2020)

From the point of view of comfort, integrating biophilia into the design of homes would mean good ventilation (wind) for cooling the house. From the point of view of resource conservation, it could mean collecting rainwater at the household level whenever it rains. And from the point of view of someone in charge of the household chores, it would mean having good sunlight to dry the laundry.

Laundry being kissed by the sun. (Source: Author, 2022)

[i] An explanation of why sun-dried laundry sounds good: https://www.futurity.org/line-dried-laundry-smells-2402452/

[ii] Line-drying clothes under the sun is suggested as an effective way to prevent odours in clothes: https://www.healthline.com/health/how-to-get-smell-out-of-clothes

[iii] For examples, see: Vanderia HM1002UV – VANDERIA and EZ Bella (Automated) (ezziliving.com)

[iv] From: https://theeverydaynature.com/2020/04/10/yingshan-lau-singapore/

Abstract

Involving rural communities in nature conservation is important for tackling the biodiversity loss and environmental degradation in Southeast Asia. Using iNaturalist as a platform, a BioBlitz event was organised at the Human Ecology Practical Area (HEPA) in Ha Tinh province on 2-3 January 2021 with the dual objectives of (1) kickstarting the systematic documentation of local species diversity in the restored forest environment and (2) engaging the local community in nature education. The BioBlitz@HEPA event involved a total of 63 participants (students, educators, officials and local area support staff) from Son Kim 1 commune and 12 volunteer organisers from HEPA, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. 103 observations were uploaded onto iNaturalist and, with the crowdsourced contribution of taxonomic identifiers around the world, 12 species have been preliminarily identified as of August 2021. The event increased students’ appreciation about nature, exposed educators to a more effective pedagogy and made all those involved more enthusiastic about Vietnam’s nature. As rural communities live near natural resources and hence are at the frontlines of nature conservation, it is important to continue investing in environmental and nature education programmes to strengthen their motivation to protect the nature that is right at their backyard.

Keywords:

• biodiversity
• rural community
• iNaturalist
• citizen science
• nature conservation

Authors:

Yingshan LAU¹, Thi Hoai Thu NGUYEN², Carlos G. VELAZCO-MACÍAS³, To Kien DANG⁴, Van Vin LOC⁵, Lien PHAM⁶, Thi My Hoa NGUYEN7⁶, Thi Lan DUONG⁸, Thanh Tung PHAN⁹

¹Department of Geography, National University of Singapore (lau_ying_shan@u.nus.edu)

²Human Ecology Practical Area (HEPA)

³Citizen Science Team, National Geographic Society

⁴Community Entrepreneur Development Institute (CENDI)

⁵Human Ecology Practical Area (HEPA)

⁶Saigon Outdoor Kids

⁷Son Kim 1 Primary School

⁸Son Kim Secondary School

⁹Son Kim 1 Commune People’s Committee

 Introduction

Southeast Asia is a region with high risk of animals becoming extinct, due to factors such as poverty, inadequate infrastructure, weak governance of protected areas and uncontrolled wildlife trade (Sodhi et al, 2004; Duckworth et al, 2012). Being located in remote areas, rural communities are at the frontlines of conservation, yet they tend to lack access to opportunities and resources for environmental conservation (Neudert et al, 2016; Mendez-Lopez et al, 2017; Chiutsi and Saarinen, 2017). The most effective form of environmental conservation starts from the heart: a values-driven ethic about their relationship with nature, inculcated through realising the wonders of nature, e.g. the various flora and fauna, or the ecosystem services (Washington, 2018).

The engagement of rural communities via citizen science can increase awareness, knowledge and  appreciation about the biodiversity in remote areas. While there lacks consensus about what citizen science specifically is (Aristeidou, 2021), it can be understood as “the practice of public participation and collaboration in scientific research to increase scientific knowledge” in which “people share and contribute to data monitoring and collection programmes” (NGS, 2021a). Benefits include allowing public participation in science and informally improving the scientific knowledge of volunteers (Aristeidou, 2021). Citizen science combines public education with research, and the resultant environmental data generates publicly-available information that informs global biodiversity conservation, monitoring, and planetary stewardship (Dickinson et al, 2012; Chandler et al, 2017). When designed with citizen science approaches in mind, nature appreciation events targeted at rural communities are platforms for knowledge-transfer, capacity-building, documentation and reinforcement of our motivation for environmental conservation.

The growing pervasiveness of digital technology and network connectivity in rural areas enables citizen science.  One such tool to promote nature appreciation is the iNaturalist platform, a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society (iNaturalist, 2021a). Founded in 2008, iNaturalist allows the public to easily document biodiversity by making observations of organisms around them via taking photos or audio recordings (Nugent, 2018). Examples of the uses of iNaturalist has included: engaging first-year undergraduate biology students in outdoor laboratories in the USA (Unger et al, 2020) and, more recently, to document sightings of large mammals in urban centres during periods of restricted human activity arising from the Covid-19 pandemic (Vardi et al, 2021). BioBlitzes are events that bring together scientists, students, educators and community members to find and identify as many species as possible in a specific area over a short period of time, and they make use of iNaturalist to accelerate citizen science (NGS, 2021b).

Most citizen science programmes are in Europe, North America, South Africa, India and Australia (Chandler et al, 2017), so BioBlitz@HEPA is unique in that it was held in Vietnam. This was a BioBlitz event that was conducted at the Human Ecology Practical Area (HEPA) on 2-3 January, involving a total of 42 primary and secondary school students as well as other local stakeholders in the rural community of Son Kim 1 commune, Ha Tinh province. In addition to being a nature appreciation activity, it kickstarted the systematic record of species diversity in HEPA through the use of iNaturalist. This paper shares how BioBlitz@HEPA was organised, the biodiversity that was observed during the event and the feedback from the participants.

Methods

1. Study site

BioBlitz@HEPA took place in the Human Ecology Practical Area (HEPA), a forest protection area (approximately 18°26’N, 105°11’E) in Son Kim 1 commune, Huong Son district, Ha Tinh province (HEPA, 2021). HEPA is a 500-ha forest site located in Central Vietnam and within the Northern Annamites tropical rainforest region. HEPA’s forest has been restored from a heavily-logged site over the last 19 years (2002-2021), thanks to the enormous and persistent reforestation and protection efforts of a small group of civil society. Over the years, there have been observations of many animal species returning to HEPA, but there has not been an opportunity to systematically document these. Moreover, it has been the more affluent city-folk who have attended HEPA’s environmental workshops and nature retreats. Hence, BioBlitz@HEPA was an exceptional opportunity to contribute species data in a lesser-studied area, and to inculcate motivation for environmental conservation amongst the rural community.

2. Organising BioBlitz@HEPA

BioBlitz@HEPA took place on 2-3 January 2020. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the organisation took over a year and required a lot of perseverance and negotiation with the Son Kim 1 local commune authorities. Well-formed plans were postponed twice and then reactivated at the eleventh hour as restrictions on domestic travel were imposed and then eased. It was initially planned that volunteers experienced in nature guiding and knowledge in biodiversity would travel from Singapore, but in light of the growing contagion and its impact on international travel, the plan had to be changed. A series of online training sessions were conducted so that a team of about seven volunteers from Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) and HEPA (i.e. the Vietnam planning team) could lead the event instead. The online training sessions covered (1) the use of iNaturalist by the iNaturalist coordinator from Mexico and (2) the specific methods for conducting nature surveys by the Singaporean project lead, e.g. kick-sampling and line transects.

Considering that the event was planned for primary and secondary school students, safety was of the utmost priority and many stakeholders were involved in planning the event. The Vietnam planning team sought permission from the District Education Department of Huong Son district and relevant agencies. Representatives of Son Kim 1 commune discussed with the youth union, local police, and clinical units to ensure participants’ safety. The Vietnam planning team also chose sites within HEPA that were suitable for the experiential learning objectives of encountering biodiversity in a fun and engaging manner, and which were also safe for the young students.

Table 1 summaries the total number of participants in the BioBlitz event on 2-3 January 2021.The participant students were nominated by their respective schools based on their good academic performance in Biology, their confidence in speaking and sharing, their ability to understand English and their good behaviour. Volunteers from HEPA, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City took on the role as of organisers: experts, guides, facilitators and photographers. In line with HEPA’s ethos of “teaching by learning and learning by doing”, these volunteer organisers also learnt about the biodiversity in HEPA and nature conservation issues through their involvement in the event.

Table 1: List of people involved in the BioBlitz@HEPA on 2-3 January 2021.

3. The BioBlitz@HEPA event programme

In planning BioBlitz@HEPA as a fun and engaging nature appreciation event for students, three learning objectives were identified: (i) To develop in children a sense of awe/fascination for nature, (ii) To understand that different habitats are home to different flora/fauna, and (iii) To know the importance of forest conservation.

For each day, participants were divided into two large groups of about 16-17 persons (about 10 students) per group. After the morning’s briefing and introductions, students were guided to the various sites in HEPA. The local guides and the biology teachers from the schools gave explanations to the students along the way (Figure 1), such as the role of forests, the importance of conservation actions and the long-term forest protection work done in HEPA, while the students took photographs of their observations (Figure 2). Three different habitats were covered: freshwater, eco-farm and forest (Figures 3, 4 and 5). Figure 6 shows the locations of the respective habitats. The freshwater habitat was represented by the Rao An River and its tributary stream. The eco-farm habitat was represented by HEPA’s Khe Soong Farm and Thuong Uyen Farm. The forest site was along the paths leading to Khe Soong Farm, on the rocky roads leading to Cay Khe Farm and, for the Grade 7 students to explore further, along the inner route behind Linh Moc Farm. Emphasis was given to wild organisms, i.e. those not cultivated and reared by humans. At the river, the groups adopted a ‘kick-sampling’ method (TAF, 2017). At the eco-farms and in the forest, the groups adopted a ‘line transect’ method (BBC, 2021). Learning points and discussion questions, summarised in Table 2, were offered at ‘teachable moments’ during the BioBlitz nature guiding. A general ethos of “Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints” was adopted at all sites to remind participants to collect all their belongings and make sure there is no litter, emphasising the need to respect nature. In the afternoon, there were talks on the importance of biodiversity and on the local conservation efforts in Vietnam. This included a short English presentation from Singapore via Skype, which was translated to Vietnamese by the facilitators and three students.

Figure 1: A local guides providing explanation to the students along the forest route. (Photo credit: HEPA)

Figure 2: Students took photographs of their observations. (Photo credit: HEPA)

Figure 3: BioBlitz@HEPA participants at the Rao An River, a freshwater habitat. (Photo credit: HEPA)

Figure 4: Khe Soong Farm, an eco-farm habitat. (Photo credit: HEPA)

Figure 5: The HEPA forest. (Photo credit: HEPA)

Figure 6: Map showing the locations of the freshwater habitats, the eco-farm habitats, the forest habitat in HEPA (approximately 18°26’N, 105°11’E) as well as the iNaturalist observations from BioBlitz@HEPA. (Source: Authors, using iNaturalist (2021b) overlaid onto Google Satellite base map.)

Table 2: Learning points and reflection questions, leveraging on teachable moments that could occur in each habitat.

Assessment of the participants’ learning were through group presentations and interviews. Over the two days, eight group presentations were made by the students in the afternoon. The students shared what they had observed during the morning’s guided field trip. Interviews were conducted with six students and two teachers and recorded on video, with informed consent. The interview questions for the students were: “What did you see today?”; “What did you learn today about nature?”; and “What should you do to protect the environment and biodiversity?” The interview questions for the teachers included: “What are your thoughts about the BioBlitz@HEPA programme?”; and “How does this relate to what students learn in school about Biology?” Insights to the participants’ learning were also gleaned from the organisers’ interactions with them, e.g. conversations during breaks and over the campfire.

After the event, the geo-tagged photo observations were uploaded onto iNaturalist by the teachers and the organisers. The image recognition algorithm on the iNaturalist platform suggested a preliminary species identification of these observations, and taxonomic identifiers from around the world went through these observations to confirm them. When two or more identifiers agreed on the species, the observation was considered ‘research-grade’ and became part of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, an open-source database used by scientists and policy makers around the world (GBIF, 2021).

Results

1. A preliminary biodiversity database for HEPA

From BioBlitz@HEPA, there were a total of 103 observations.[1] As of August 2021, 31 citizen-science taxonomic identifiers from around the world helped to identify the species in the observations, and 11 observations were research grade. As the uploaded observations were geotagged, the geographical distribution of the observations is also accessible on iNaturalist project webpage (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/hepa-bioblitz-2020-nat-geo and Figure 6) (iNaturalist, 2021b). About 15% of the observations could be identified up to the species level, from which there were 12 distinct species. Examples of observations from the freshwater habitat are: green algae Chlorophyta, frogs/toads Anura and crabs Brachyura (Figure 7). Examples from the forest and eco-farm habitats are: splitgill mushrooms Schizophyllum commune, Elephant’s Foot Elephantopus mollis and Asian House Gecko Hemidactylus frenatus (Figure 8). Table 3 provides a summary of the observations.

Figure 7: Observations of flora and fauna at the freshwater habitat. (Source: iNaturalist, 2021b)

Figure 8: Observations of flora and fauna at the eco-farm and forest habitats. (Source: iNaturalist, 2021b)

Table 3: List of observations from BioBlitz@HEPA and their taxonomic rank.

[1] Excluding four observations of ‘Homo sapiens’ and five non-useable observations (e.g. blur or non-specific).

2. Students: increased appreciation about nature

For many students, it was their first time venturing into the forest. They were very excited and curious, with many questions for the facilitators. From the organisers’ interactions with the students, the students expressed that they wanted return to HEPA in the summer. With their field observations uploaded on iNaturalist and hence made available to the global community, they felt proud and more confident of their work.

During the group presentations, they shared that they became highly aware of the importance of nature in providing them with a safe place to play and to live. For example, they developed a better understanding of the relationships between trees, animals, insects, bacteria, fungi and the environment. They also expressed their commitment to take action in daily activities to protect biodiversity and nature and to encourage their friends and family to protect the environment.

A student from Son Kim 1 Primary School said during the interview:

“Today when we went to the river, I saw the fishes, fish and frog eggs; I also saw the different shades of rocks, stones – they are very nice. This afternoon we visited the forest: I saw Lim trees, a forest chicken, insects and spiders.”

• • • • • • • • • Male student from Son Kim 1 Primary School (translated from Vietnamese)

Beyond specifying what they observed, students from Son Kim Secondary School expressed the importance of nature in terms of how human beings are dependent on it:

“I learnt a lot of things today: the diversity of nature around us. After the trip, I know that nature has an important place in our lives. It provides us with food, clothes, drinks and clean air.”

• • • • • • • • • Female student from Son Kim Secondary School

“Today, I learnt a lot of things about nature and the importance of nature. As we know, nature is an essential part of our lives. It provides food, drink, clean air, and it helps human beings, animals and other living beings to grow and develop naturally.”

• • • • • • • • • Female student from Son Kim Secondary School

The interviewees expressed the need to protect nature:

“We must not destroy the trees, the environment; and need to protect nature, the forest, and plant more trees, protect the environment, and take care of our planet for a beautiful life.”

• • • • • • • • • Male student from Son Kim 1 Primary School (translated from Vietnamese)

“Today, nature is being destroyed. A lot of trees are cut. The water we drink everyday is polluted. So we must learn to protect nature. We must learn not to throw rubbish everywhere; tell everyone that we must protect, and the importance of, nature.”

• • • • • • • • • Female student from Son Kim Secondary School

“We should [keep nature clean] and reduce the amount of waste [generated] and many other single[-use] waste.”

• • • • • • • • • Female student from Son Kim Secondary School

3. Educators: a more effective pedagogy

The teachers were happy to witness that enjoying nature provides an immense opportunity for students to learn and develop. Their students were able to directly see and touch the flora and fauna, which the experts concurrently explained about. Pedagogically, organizing such outdoor lessons as experiential learning enables students to learn more effectively than instruction in the classroom (Son Kim 1 commune, 2021). They fed back that the event was effective in getting people to engage with and enjoy the real world through the use of iNaturalist.

“Through this outdoor activity, students have learnt and understood about the biodiversity that surrounds us. In the school, students [have] already learnt this topic but it is in theory and separately in each small topic. However, via today’s outdoor activity, students learnt lots of new things from the diverse knowledges in biodiversity to the methodology by [the organisers] from HEPA, Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and Singapore. Students are confident to observe fauna and flora in the HEPA forest, from these activities they can understand more about the theories which they learnt from the school.”

• • • • • • • • • • Teacher from Son Kim 1 Primary School (translated from Vietnamese)

4. Other stakeholders: increased enthusiasm about Vietnam’s nature

The Son Kim 1 commune government was proud that HEPA hosted this BioBlitz event. The local police, who oversees the Vietnamese-Lao border, learnt a new way of educating people about forest protection. The volunteers from Hanoi and HCMC were spellbound by the forest’s beauty and impressed by the collaboration from the local teachers and the local government. The commune Vice-Chairman added that he would like to replicate the event for more people in the commune. All participants enjoyed learning about nature and would like the event to happen again.

Discussion

The preliminary biodiversity database for HEPA is an evolving one. iNaturalist is a ‘live’ platform and the identification of species in the uploaded observations would continue to evolve with the involvement of more taxonomic identifiers from Vietnam and around the world. For example, the total number of identified species recorded from BioBlitz@HEPA could increase or decrease from 12 as more identifiers take part in identifying the observations and either agree or disagree with the identifications of other identifiers. Although the Singaporean project lead and the Vietnam planning team members were not taxonomic experts, developing such a preliminary biodiversity database for HEPA was possible because iNaturalist linked up with project with the global community of taxonomic identifiers. With the growing prevalence of mobile internet-associated technologies (Blaschke, 2012) including in rural areas, this shows that iNaturalist is a useful tool for developing local biodiversity databases.

As an educational activity, the BioBlitz@HEPA event was not able to completely reflect the range of fauna that can be found in HEPA (e.g. chameleons, squirrels, cobras, iguanas, pangolins, birds and nocturnal animals), because it had many participants and was conducted during the day. Nonetheless, the preliminary open-source database, with its geotagged photographic records of flora and fauna such as forest mushrooms and spiders, is a good start for HEPA. This database will be used to enrich the curriculum of HEPA’s environmental workshops and nature retreats for the younger generation.

Against the backdrop of an ongoing global pandemic, the positive feedback from all participants, especially regarding how their perception of nature was transformed, made the arduous organisational efforts all the more meaningful. The Vietnam planning team and the organisers felt that they were doing their part to avert future pandemics, by reinforcing in the rural Son Kim 1 community a love for nature. This is because protecting Earth’s fragile ecosystems has never been more urgent due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is attributed to an imbalance between nature and mankind (UNEP, 2020). As the participants unanimously reflected, there is value to conducting similar nature appreciation events for the Son Kim 1 local community at HEPA again.

Conclusion

BioBlitz@HEPA took place on 2-3 January 2021 with the cooperation of the Son Kim 1 commune government, school teachers and other local area support staff. Through iNaturalist, the event kickstarted the systematic documentation of local biodiversity. A total of 103 observations were uploaded onto the event’s iNaturalist project page. With the contribution of the global community of scientists and taxonomic identifiers, 11 observations were research grade and a total of 12 species were identified. The event also increased the appreciation of nature amongst the 42 student participants from the commune’s primary and secondary schools, exposed local educators to a more effective pedagogy of learning through outdoor activities and amplified local stakeholders’ enthusiasm about Vietnam’s nature.

Communities in rural areas live close to nature, yet may not be the most well-resourced. Engaging their hearts will steer them towards daily decisions that are pro-nature, hence it is important to conduct more environmental and nature education for them. Particularly, the youth can be environmental advocates in their communities. Further investment and support are needed to engage rural communities on this agenda, for example by conducting more BioBlitz events. iNaturalist is a helpful tool to enable this.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for the technical advice and iNaturalist support from Mr Carlos Velazco, the dedicated work from the staff at HEPA, and the advice on biodiversity survey methods from Mr Junhien Chong and Mr Raymond Karam. Heartfelt appreciation also goes to the principals and teachers of Son Kim 1 primary school and Son Kim secondary school, the leaders of Son Kim 1 commune in Huong Son district, Ha Tinh province, Vietnam. BioBlitz@HEPA was funded in part through a grant from the National Geographic Society.

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note: this blog entry is reproduced from an NUS Geography Independent Study Module paper on community forestry, submitted in end-2017

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1. Introduction

Forests provide a multitude of benefits at various scales. Locally, they provide livelihoods and cultural identities for forest-dependent communities. Regionally, they provide ecosystem services such as watershed protection and biodiversity conservation. At the global scale, forests provide the raw materials for the timber and pulp industries. To balance these objectives, neoliberal instruments have been developed to steer the direction of forest use and management. These include forest certification and legality initiatives, and payments for ecosystem services (PES).

More recently in the past two decades, forests have been recognised as a means of carbon sequestration and storage and have been incorporated into the international carbon discourse. The main framework to steer forest governance towards meeting carbon-related objectives is the United Nations’ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programme, a form of PES. While Seymour and Busch (2016) argue that REDD+ can also meet biodiversity and livelihood outcomes and should be further proliferated with larger financial and political investments, McDermott (2017) cautioned that more nuanced and context-specific approaches, rather than a singular focus on carbon financing, are required for effective and equitable forest management, simply because dimensions of power and risk are inextricable from the local realities of forest management.

This cautionary note is particularly resounding for at least approximately 20% of the world’s forests[1], which are managed via community-based forestry regimes, and for about a third of the world’s population, who rely on forests for their livelihoods (FAO, 2017). While community-based forestry (CBF) regimes have the potential to achieve both improved livelihoods and sustainable forest management, on-the-ground operational challenges means that layering on additional expectations such as meeting PES or REDD+ targets could unhelpfully over-burden CBF (FAO, 2016a).

This paper aims to assess the extent to which contemporary global forest policy initiatives makes sense to CBF regimes. By ‘making sense’, I refer to whether contemporary global forest policy initiatives are aligned to, and help further, CBF’s agenda of sustainable forest management and livelihood improvement. After introducing CBF, I will explore the main instruments of contemporary global forest policies, i.e. forest certifications and legality initiatives, and PES. A range of instruments are considered, as opposed to focussing only on REDD+, for greater breadth.

2. Community-based forestry

The concept of community-based forestry (CBF), or community forestry, was first mainstreamed about forty years ago, when the FAO launched its seminal paper on Forestry for Local Community Development in 1978 (FAO, 1978). Over the years, it has gained traction because it offers an alternative to the failures of centralised management to control deforestation (e.g. fortress conservation), its coherence with larger economy-wide and institutional reforms to reduce government spending, and its ability to meet increasing demands for greater community involvement in natural resource governance (FAO, 2016a). These were fuelled by the popular narrative by Ostrom (1990) that local communities can autonomously organise and develop local institutions to manage natural resources sustainably if they are given sufficient property rights over local forest commons. In developing countries, CBF was welcomed because of its potential to improve rural livelihoods in addition to reducing forest degradation (FAO, 2016a). More recently, the push to recognise the fundamental rights of indigenous and local communities over traditional lands and natural resources has also strengthened the concept of CBF as a politically-legitimate and humanistic mode of forest management (FAO, 2016a).

While the motivations behind CBF may evolve, the persistent characteristic of CBF is the idea of some level of participation by smallholders and community groups in the planning and implementation of forest management (FAO, 2016a). Hajjar et al (2016) broadly defines CBF as “forest use and governance arrangements under which the rights, responsibilities and authority for forest management rest, at least in part, with local communities,” in traditional or endogenous forms as well as in the form of initiatives introduced by NGOs, governments or other external parties. This broad definition means that CBF can range from passive participation in government programmes (e.g. participatory conservation or joint forest management) on one end of the spectrum to active control by communities (e.g. fully-devolved community forestry or private ownership) on the other end of the spectrum, as the number of and strength of rights accorded to the community increases (FAO, 2016a). Accordingly, the types of rights granted to the community is reflective of the government’s level of trust in community and the outcomes it wishes out of CBF. For example, in border areas where citizenship is contested, it is rare for governments to fully devolve management rights and land ownership to the community. Desired outcomes could range from improving rural livelihoods, sustaining a local community’s spiritual or cultural identity, to co-opting the community to protect the forest for the government. Whereas the former outcome is more likely achieved by encouraging active control by communities, the latter outcome simply requires the community’s participation in the government’s programme.

CBF is often positioned as ‘the local community’ versus ‘the other power’ – the government, a multi-national company, an external aid agency, etc. However, it is worth noting that ‘the local community’ is not one homogenous entity, but a group with its own internal dynamics and politics. The CBF regime of granting property rights to individual households may instead accentuate divisions within the ‘community’: for example, in Japan where individual property rights are strong, owners can sell the trees in their private forests to logging companies, and the involvement and coordination of municipal-level forest associations are required to avoid unintended systems-scale impacts such as landslides (Tanaka and Inoue, 2016). The devolvement of forest management rights to the community may also result in uneven development between households: Moktan et al (2016) found that household income varied between the rich and poor households in two cases of CBF in Bhutan, and recommended that CBF interventions should also ensure an even playing field between households of differing capital. Hence, a fundamental premise behind Ostrom’s proposition that local communities can autonomously organise to sustainably manage natural resources if they are given sufficient property rights, therefore, is that there are mediating actors who can enable local institutional norms to persist, steer the community towards a common goal, and even out differences between individuals within the community. In endogenous or traditional CBF, this role is taken up by the community leaders or elders; whereas leaders could be (self-)appointed in externally-initiated CBF. External parties may also play a role in supporting or influencing this role, particularly in times of demographic changes or external pressures. For example, rural villages in Japan are predominantly elderly and benefit from an infusion of younger residents to steer the community (Tanaka and Inoue, 2016). In Brazil, the adoption of the Forest Stewardship Council certification by smallholders is facilitated by NGOs like the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) (McDermott et al, 2015).

Although the outcomes of CBF have been mixed and its effectiveness difficult to evaluate (Hajjar et al, 2016; FAO, 2016a), CBF is promoted by many conservation and development practitioners as model of state-community partnership to meet the dual goals of improving rural livelihood and sustainable forest management (Moktan et al, 2016). For CBF to achieve these aims, the requisite conditions are secure tenure, an enabling regulatory framework, strong governance, viable technology, adequate market knowledge and a supportive bureaucracy (FAO, 2016a). These conditions should be viewed through the milieu of the day-to-day realities faced by local communities. For example, externally-initiated CBF should provide good forests for the community to begin with: in Vietnam, because degraded forestland is was allocated, communities instead choose to continue to illegally harvest from the conserved, special use forests (Dam and Barber, 2015); in Bhutan, the Department of Forests had to allocate 50% timber-stocked forests from state forests alongside 50% degraded forests to incentivise community forest management groups to take over the management and reforestation and degraded forest areas (Moktan et al, 2016). Moreover, Nurrochmat et al (2016) argued that trees are viewed by local communities in Indonesia as a financial safety net and not a product with planned yields. These are among some of the complexities which hinders the linkage of CBF with contemporary global forest policies, which I will discuss in the next sections.

3. Contemporary global forest policy initiatives

If the strength of governance is judged by having one hegemonic institution that defines the direction and oversees the implementation and enforcement of activities, then the existing state of global forest governance is weak. Presently, only the United Nations Forum on Forests exists, but it is at best only a platform for discussion; on the other hand, frameworks like the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change do discuss the topic of forests, but often only with respect to their respective aims of biodiversity conservation or climate change mitigation (Bhagwat and Humphries, 2017). This reflects the nature of forests as places which provide multiple benefits, perhaps even as contested places when these benefits increase in salience and compete against one another. Considering that one-third of the world’s population depend on forests, it is little wonder that Kanowski et al (2011) argued that, while adequately-defined international frameworks should exist to provide guidance, implementation of programmes like REDD+ should be organic, locally-empowering and accompanied by capacity-building. Likewise, Bhagwat and Humphries (2017) recommend bottom-up frameworks which involves local coalitions of actors combined with social learning.

Nonetheless, between 1990 and 2015, the area of the world’s forests dwindled by 129 million hectares (FAO, 2016b), and there is an urgent need to safeguard forests, whether against rampant exploitation by logging companies or against degradation due to land use change. In this respect, certification and legality initiatives as well as PES are the two main forest policy instruments that have emerged. As products of their time, they are designed to operate within, and have the associated shortcomings of, a paradigm of neoliberal economics.

• Forest certification and legality initiatives

Certifications are voluntary, non-state market-driven mechanisms that developed out of the lack of credibility about industry self-regulation, the increase in stakeholder influence and the change in norms about good industry governance to emphasise collaboration and partnership (Tuppura et al, 2016). The first forest certification was launched by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) in 1993, with the idea of attaching a “green” label to forest products produced according to standards of responsible and sustainable forest products. (McDermott et al, 2015). Third-party assessors to ensure that global-scale and national-scale FSC standards are met from the forest product’s origin to its point of sale, and environmentally-conscious consumers could then exercise their purchasing power by choosing certified wood products (McDermott, 2015). Following the launch of the NGO-led FSC certification, other competing certification schemes were formed by forest industry associations and wood producer groups in key wood-producing countries, and some these were gradually subsumed under the umbrella Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes (PEFC) from 1999 onwards. Examples of voluntary nationally-determined certification standards aligned to the PEFC framework are the Malaysian Timber Certification Scheme (MTCS) which was endorsed by the PEFC in 2009 (Lewis and Davis, 2015), and the certification under Japan’s Sustainable Green Ecosystem Council (SGEC) which is deemed more appropriate than the FSC certification for Japan’s context of overgrown artificial forestry (email interview, 2017b).

Forest certification schemes aim to boost the brand image of forest-related products and are voluntary in nature. This could explain why only 10% of the world’s forests are certified, and only 95% of the certified forests are based in temperate countries where business operating frameworks are clearer (Tuppura et al, 2016) when the original intention of forest certification is to counter deforestation in the tropics (McDermott, et al, 2015). To address the challenge of getting logging companies or wood suppliers to ‘opt in’, legality initiatives exist set the minimum benchmark before any forest-related product can be traded on the market. The most notable legality initiative is the European Union’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan and Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPA). Developed in 2003 to limit illegal timber being imported into the EU, FLEGT-VPAs may be voluntarily entered between the EU and the government of a timber-producing and trading partner country, but becomes legally binding when the agreement is ratified by both parties (Mustalahti et al, 2017). Since Indonesia and the EU signed the FLEFT-VPA in 2013, the Sistem Verifikasi Legalitas Kayu (SVLK) has emerged as a national-scale legality initiative to ensure that forest products in Indonesia meet the requirements of the FLEGT-VPA before being exported to the EU (Nurrochmat et al, 2016).

Both forest certification schemes and legality initiatives aim to ultimately promote sustainable forest management by targeting the production process of the forest-related product. They acknowledge the existence of the global industry of timber and other forest-related products, and aim to influence processes in the industry by developing standards of acceptability, e.g. the legality of the origin of the wood, and reduced-impact logging as a best management practice. As such, they are particularly relevant in countries with a significant commercial forestry sector, e.g. Indonesia and Japan, but not so in Bhutan (email interview, 2017a).

• Payments for ecosystem services (PES)

Unlike forest certification and legality initiatives which seek to govern the production processes of forest-related products, the interest of PES lies in the environmental services of forestland. These include watershed protection, biodiversity conservation, and carbon sequestration and storage.

There is no known start date of the idea of PES, but literature suggests that it emerged in the 2000s (FAO, 2016a; Hahn et al, 2015). Essentially, PES is “a mechanism to translate external, non-market values of the environment into real financial incentives for local actors to provide environmental services” (Engel et al, 2008), i.e. that the beneficiaries of environmental services make direct, contractual and conditional payments to relevant landholders in return for adopting ecosystem conservation and restoration practices. PES has the most potential to be applied where there is a need to protect large forests for their ecosystem services, by incentivising the relevant landholders to maintain or improve the conditions of their forests to deliver certain environmental services.

At the national level, PES schemes have been developed for watershed and landscape beauty protection. Since 2010, Vietnam requires users of forest environmental services (forest users e.g. water supply companies, hydropower plants, tourism companies) to make fixed payments to suppliers of these services (forest owners e.g. individuals, households, communities and organisations holding titles to forestland); the rates to be paid are pegged by the government to the commercial or production outputs of the forest users (FAO, 2016a). These PES payments supplement the state budgets for forest protection, and have the potential to strengthen much-needed incentives to engage local stakeholders in forest management initiatives (email interview, 2017c).

At the global scale, a renowned PES scheme is the United Nations’ REDD+ programme, in which developed nations can pay forest-rich developing nations to reduce their carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and to enhance their forest carbon stocks. There has been much debate over REDD+, ranging from whether it perversely incentivises the replacement of old-growth forests with newly-planted forest stands, whether  deforestation and forest degradation leads to significant carbon emissions (for example, carbon is still stored in wood that is used as furniture), to whether the programme adequately addresses the underlying drivers of forest loss. Nonetheless, since 2008, Norway has committed large amounts of finances to Brazil, Guyana, Indonesia, Peru and Liberia (Seymour et al, 2015). Although Norway eventually withheld payments because Indonesia fell short of its targets, Seymour et al (2015) argue that the performance-based nature of the payments accompanied by satellite monitoring technologies makes REDD+ a favourable programme: the preparatory work undertaken has helped to gradually transform Indonesia’s sluggish institutions, the large sums of money at stake (up to US$1 billion) has garnered significant support within the Indonesian bureaucracy, and payor’s right of non-payment for non-performance sends a strong signal to the payee about the importance of the deliverables.

Yet, PES faces several conceptual difficulties. The most common critique is that PES is based on the premise that nature can be commodified. Hahn et al (2015) points out that there are various levels of commodifying nature, of which the lowest level could be based on regulatory instead of monetary instruments, and subsidy-like PES paid by governments and market-based PES constitute higher levels of commodifying nature. However, until clear markets are formed for particular environmental services, the determination of the PES amount will not be completely market-based. When markets do form, it is imperative to avoid the over-commodification of nature, such as the development of forest bonds and biodiversity derivatives (Hahn et al, 2015). This is these financial instruments operate within a completely different set of rules from natural world, e.g. the idea of credits and derivatives does not apply in nature. Moreover, there needs to be clarity on the types of forest ecosystem services that are being pursued (Newton et al, 2016), such that should a market develop for one kind of ecosystem service but not the others (e.g. carbon storage and sequestration but not biodiversity conservation), appropriate safeguards would be implemented to ensure that the other types of forest ecosystem services are not neglected.

Furthermore, because of the existing difficulty of determining payment amounts, subsidy-like PES should ideally be designed such that the benefits from PES are just greater than the benefits from pursuing business-as-usual (Graham et al, 2016) or from pursuing another land use alternative. The PES amount could be modest if the situation to be avoided is the conversion of forestland to small-scale agriculture; but it could exponentially increase beyond available budgets if the issue to be avoided is the conversion to large-scale oil palm plantations. More presciently, where there is no issue with business-as-usual and there is no alternative situation to be avoided, applying PES would seem no more than a case of ‘if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’.

4. Global forest policy initiatives and CBF

• Relevance of certification and legality initiatives to CBF

By virtue that certification and legality initiatives aim to govern the production processes of forest-related products, they should logically be the most related to CBF regimes where communities engage with the markets to sell timber and other forest-related products. On the flipside, they would not be applicable to CBF regimes where communities depend on forests solely for subsistence, e.g. forms of participatory conservation where the communities are only allowed to harvest non-timber forest products. This suggests that there is more relevance to CBF regimes where the community’s rights to manage the forest are stronger, as the community would be able to self-organise to determine how to engage the markets. In Indonesia, property rights for smallholders are well-defined, and since domestic certification standards are well-accepted in the local markets, meeting these certification standards helps to boost the legality and hence saleability of smallholders’ timber products within both the domestic and international markets (Nurrochmat, 2016). In tandem with certification standards and legality initiatives that are robust, strong and well-defined tenure can provide conditions for CBF to achieve both livelihood improvement and sustainable forest management.

However, an assumption is that communities have the sufficient market knowledge and capacity engage in the forest certification scheme. Certification of timber products from CBF has required extensive financial and technical support (Pokorny et al, 2010). Additional effort and costs are required to participate in certification programmes, which highlights the nature of certification schemes as controlling the production process without channelling additional financial gains to the producer (Nurrochmat et al, 2016). Moreover, certification offers the benefits of improved brand image to companies, and this may not be the concern of smallholders involved in CBF. Cases where community forests have been certified are likely facilitated by a mission-oriented and less profit-driven forest certifier (Pinto and McDermott, 2013).

In addition, while certification schemes set the desirable environmental standards, these are often geared towards influencing large-scale forest plantations. Even if communities have the requisite market knowledge and capacity to engage in the forest certification process, they may not have advantage over the larger companies: a family-run slow-growing woodlot, for example, would meet the same certification standards as a forest monoculture plantation (McDermott, 2015). To enable market differentiation, the design and criteria of forest certification schemes could be adapted to accentuate the additional environmental values of CBF regimes, such as the socio-cultural values which also promote the sustainable forestry. Tweaks in forest certification schemes are already happening: for example, the FSC has already started to move beyond the certification of wood products towards piloting forest certification for forest ecosystem services, and certification of easily-quantifiable services such as biodiversity conservation, carbon storage, and non-timber forest products seem to have the most acceptability amongst stakeholders of the certification value chain (Juang et al, 2016). However, Lewis and Davis (2015) and Sahide et al (2016) have observed industry players are reluctant to adopt more environmentally-sustainable criteria such as the protection of high conservation-value forests. Forest certification for CBF could also be met with similar inertia. Moreover, any specification of best management practices for community forests needs should account for the range of CBF types and the diversity of socio-cultural values between communities.  It is therefore uncertain whether a universally-applicable forest certification for CBF can be developed, or whether differentiation of CBF products would rely on numerous small-scale case-specific efforts. An example of such an effort is a researcher-developed mobile phone application for an environmentally-conscious guitar company in the USA to show to its customers the specific community forests in Guatemala from which it obtains the wood for making its guitars (McDermott, 2015).

With little incentive for community forests to partake in certification schemes, legality initiatives which set the minimum acceptable standards for forest products may instead help to reinforce the thread of sustainable forest management in CBF. However, it is important to consider the day-to-day milieu of the communities when designing legality initiatives. For example, McDermott et al (2015) argue that international legality initiatives which focus on traceability of forest products, and if well-enforced by the state, may squeeze out local producers, simply because timber supply chains from small-scale forestry are very fragmented and difficult to track. Hence, the overzealous tightening of legality initiatives, whilst theoretically beneficial for the environment, may unintentionally blindside local communities.

Given the above constraints, how can CBF be steered towards more sustainable forest management? Ostrom’s proposition that local communities with sufficient property rights can self-organise to manage their resources sustainably may not always hold true, particularly if the community is undergoing change. For example, vast areas of smallholder forestland in Laos have been converted to monoculture rubber plantations due to the influence of Chinese rubber companies. Environmental NGOs may work with local communities to steer them towards more sustainable forest management practices, but often these are ad-hoc. I think that forestry companies could help to fill this space. As profit-driven entities, they are concerned by their brand image, hence would more likely participate in forest certification scheme to project corporate responsibility to consumers. However, operational constraints mean that they need to work with small-scale forest owners. Table 1 outlines the potential synergies that can be achieved in Japanese and Indonesian contexts. The forestry companies’ concurrent participation in forest certification schemes means that they are more likely to stipulate best management practices when collaborating with the local communities. In contexts like Indonesia’s, this could lead to social learning within communities about sustainable forest management practices.

Nonetheless, the collaborative frameworks described in Table 1 are only possible where there is secure tenure for local communities. This is not always the case for communities in frontier regions, where rights to customary forestland have not yet been granted due to reasons such as government oversight (Dam and Barber, 2015). Without secure tenure, the need for companies to respect local communities use of forestland is diminished, and could even negatively result in the displacement of local communities from their customary land. Fundamentally, private companies are fundamentally profit-driven entities whose actions are greatly influenced by the existing governance regimes of the countries they operate in. Of the FAO (2016)’s six requisite conditions for successful CBF, private companies can contribute by providing viable technology and adequate market knowledge, but governments still need to provide the other conditions of secure tenure, enabling regulatory frameworks, strong governance and a supportive bureaucracy.

• Relevance of PES to CBF

PES governs the environmental services from forestland, and intuitively would be the most relevant to CBF when communities fully manage or own their own land. However, in practice, PES schemes are frequently managed by government bodies, and so are evidenced mostly on the other side of the spectrum of CBF typologies, i.e. where communities are involved in participatory conservation or the joint management of forests. In instances like these in Vietnam, PES payments provide the government with additional monetary resources employ forest-dependent local communities in the protection of watershed or conservation forests (email interview, 2017c). Simplistically, PES offers the promise of meeting CBF’s dual aims of sustainable forest protection and livelihood improvement: local communities earn income which they would otherwise get from logging or the conversion of forestland for agricultural production, while the forests are protected. Further, if the payments are pegged to measurable performance indicators for desired environmental services, it is also possible to steer supposedly rational, well-informed communities towards optimising these environmental services.

However, unless PES can be operationalised such that payments go directly to local forest-dependent communities, the applicability of PES to CBF will remain limited to CBF modalities with government involvement. While it is important for the government to fill the intermediary role in managing the PES payments and disbursing it to the community, whether as cash hand-outs or in the form of infrastructure improvements, it is also equally plausible for local community leaders to fulfil this role. While on the one hand, there is practical scepticism about whether the community can properly manage additional incoming funds, the reliance on government bodies also invites criticisms that PES benefits do not trickle down to the local people.

Capacity-building within local communities is therefore necessary, and should happen at a couple of levels. The first is to familiarise local communities involved in about the mechanics of PES – if the PES scheme they are involved in is managed by the government, this will at least empower them with knowledge to hold the government accountable. For example, the community should have the right to query if they discover that a downstream hydropower company involved in a government-mediated PES scheme to pay for the watershed services provided by their forest. The second, more practical need for capacity-building is if the PES schemes are of an easily-quantifiable performance-based nature. REDD+, with its focus on forest carbon, is one such scheme. The advent of REDD+ has not only given rise to numerous REDD+ preparatory activities for governments to acquire the requisite technical knowledge and set up the relevant institutions (e.g. in Laos and Bhutan (Boutthavang et al, 2017; email interview, 2017a), but has also led to several capacity-building projects for local communities. For example, The Samdhana Institute has carried out projects to prepare indigenous peoples, local communities and other community-based organisations for REDD+ policy and implementation in Indonesia and Myanmar, and is pursuing the strategy of securing land rights for communities in Indonesia’s frontier province of Papua (The Samdhana Institute, 2017). The latter could be reflective of concerns that REDD+ implementation could lead to governments’ takeover of customary, ecologically-rich forestland to maximise the state’s benefits from REDD+.

While the above discussion has focussed on the administrative role of the government to manage the flow of benefits from payor to payee within PES schemes, governments should also play a larger planning role of ensuring nation-wide equity arising from these schemes. In their mapping of carbon-intense forests with poor areas in Laos, Hett et al (2012) found that carbon-intense forests do not always overlap with the poorest areas in Laos, suggesting that REDD+ sites should be at the less carbon-intense but economically poorer forests of Laos if REDD+ were to have pro-poor outcomes. Alternatively, the government could manage its budgets to redistribute the REDD+ benefits where needed. As such, although REDD+ may exhibit a neoliberal nature on international fora, its actual implementation within a country might not directly benefit local forest-dependent communities, which may be a secondary concern to the country’s government so long as the its REDD+ targets of reducing deforestation and forest degradation is met. Hence, in discussing the relevance of PES to CBF, a major factor would be the geographical scale of the PES targets, which would in turn affect the extent to which local communities are perceived as direct stakeholders of the PES scheme.

The long-term modality of REDD+, however, could move beyond government-to-government payments to include mechanisms of direct payments to REDD+ project sites from polluting companies as part of their carbon offset (REDD-Monitor, 2017). Consequently, local communities may well be directly involved in the PES transactions should their spiritual forests be selected as REDD+ sites. Spiritual forests of local communities have been traditionally protected for their socio-cultural value and are generally ecologically-rich and carbon-dense (Ormsby and Bhagwat, 2010). However, as companies tend to operate within the legal frameworks of the countries they operate in, such a situation would be rare in places like Vietnam where spiritual forests are not accorded the legal status of special-use, conservation forests (Dam and Barber, 2015). On the other hand, although spiritual/special-use forests are legally-recognised in Bhutan, the few PES schemes that have been implemented are only for watershed services (email interview, 2017a). This begs the question of whether there is indeed a need to apply PES for such forests: if the socio-cultural values behind the protection of these forests are sustained, and if the premise of PES is to peg payments to alternative uses of the forest but there is none imminent, then PES might not even be relevant.

Fervent economists could argue, however, that it is only a matter of the human intellect to estimate environmental services based on their intrinsic values instead of using alternatives as proxies. If so, PES could be applied to spiritual forests, as a correct reflection of their environmental value. While conceivable, applying this approach neglects the Humean view of human nature: the monetary benefits derived from the application of PES to a spiritual/special-use forest may, over time, diminish the importance of the socio-cultural values and denigrate the traditional institutions which have served to protect these forests. Dam and Barber (2015) have shown instances in Vietnam when payments from governments for forest protection cease due to a lack of budget, villagers no longer recall the socio-cultural importance of protecting their forests. Likewise, payments for PES schemes are not guaranteed to be infinite. Hence, while PES may be an additional benefit for the local community, it needs to be implemented with care and respect for existing traditional institutions.

• Combining PES with certification and legality initiatives?

Certification and legality initiatives focus on the governance of forest-related products and hence seem more relevant to types of CBF with stronger tenure. On the other hand, PES focusses on the governance of environmental services from forestland, and seem to be more common in types of CBF with larger government involvement, such as participatory conservation or joint forest management. As such, these instruments seem to be applied almost exclusively. However, forest products originate from forestland, and as such it is not impossible for these two instruments to be combined. In the example of the family-run slow-growing woodlot (McDermott, 2015), its wood products could still meet mainstream forest certification criteria, whereas PES schemes could be activated to pay for its environmental services. In this manner, PES could incentivise communities to manage their forests over and above the minimum requirements stipulated in forest certification schemes or in legality initiatives. However, from a policy standpoint, unless there is an excess of PES funding, PES payments should be better put to use in forests that are do not generate revenue. Hence, while it is not impossible to combine these two instruments, the likelihood of this happening is low.

5. Conclusion

In this paper, I have examined two types of contemporary forest policy initiatives –  certification and legality initiatives, and PES – and have discussed their relevance to CBF. Certification and legality initiatives govern forest-related products, whereas PES governs environmental services from forestland. Drawing on insights from email interviews about forestry in Vietnam, Bhutan, Japan and Indonesia, as well as literature, the former instrument seems more prevalent where community forest rights are strong. PES, on the other hand, seem to be applied where government influence in CBF is strong. Both are products of a neoliberal paradigm and have their respective shortcomings.

Nonetheless, if the relevance of contemporary forest policy initiatives to CBF is determined by whether they help to further CBF’s agenda of sustainable forest management and livelihood improvement, then the instrument of certification and legality initiatives seem to be more relevant to CBF. Notwithstanding operational difficulties, it is conceptually more aligned with the reality that forest-dependent communities depend on forest products for livelihoods. It poses the question of, if CBF is to engage with markets, whether community forests can be managed in an even more sustainable manner. On the contrary, PES begins with premise that forests provide environmental services, and the query into its relevance to CBF asks whether local communities can also be beneficiaries. In a way, the origins of PES do not seem to acknowledge that local communities depend on forests for their livelihoods. While it can be retrospectively argued that local communities also benefit from the environmental services of forests they help protect, the monetisation of these services is ontologically jarring with local traditional institutions of forest protection (Gabay and Alam, 2017).

Linking these two global forest policy instruments to CBF will be undeniably operationally complex. The cases discussed in this paper show that it is rare for all the requisite conditions for CBF’s success – secure tenure, an enabling regulatory framework, strong governance, viable technology, adequate market knowledge and a supportive bureaucracy (FAO, 2016a) – to be met. However, it seems inevitable that these instruments would affect CBF in a globalised yet carbon-constrained world. Therefore, the support of benevolent government bodies, NGOs and even the corporate responsibly arms of private companies is needed to ensure that these instruments are applied in a relevant and sustainable manner that produces CBF’s dual outcomes of sustainable forest management and livelihood improvement.

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[1] The FAO (2016) estimates that, in 62 countries assessed, 732 million hectares of forests are managed via community-based forestry regimes. In total, global forest cover is about 3,999 million hectares (FAO, 2015).

Background

My PhD research project, “Living in a watershed: the role of traditional and local practices”, aims to understand the traditional/local practices that are beneficial for the management of the watershed area of the Kuang Si Waterfall, as well as how these practices can be retained in the future. It uses a participatory action research approach whereby villagers co-identify debatable or contestable traditional/local practices and subsequently co-examine these practices through field experiments/data collection. This methodological approach not only recognises that a researcher’s relationship with the researched is bi-directional, but also legitimises my presence in the villages to do extended participant-observation in order to understand the daily lives of the villagers.

The two villages that I am focussing on are Thapene village and Nong Khuay village, from May 2019 – May 2020. This report is focussed on describing the data collection at Nong Khuay village. Mr Siphanh Daovongdeuan[1] assisted me with most of the fieldwork at Nong Khuay village.

Introduction

From June-September 2019 onwards, I conducted participant-observation in Nong Khuay village. The objective was to find out what are the traditional/local practices that are beneficial for watershed management. Participant-observation was in the form of: helping to do weeding in 3 fields (a swidden rice field, a dry paddy rice field, and a coffee farm); and helping to coordinate a volunteer project regarding improving the village’s water supply system. I also had conversations with the village leaders and villagers to become familiarised with the hydrology of the village (e.g. location of streams and sinkholes), to understand how the village protects their water bodies, and how households obtain and manage their drinking water: for example, some households boil water to remove the calcium deposits before drinking, and some houses are located farther away from communal water taps hence have more difficulty accessing water.

From this, the following ware identified as the village’s traditional/local practices that are beneficial for watershed management:

1. Forest protection area around the nam lin (village water source) (Figure 1)
   • Area zoned as protection area for about 12 years already, since the village water source was constructed
   • Benefits to watershed: Protects water quality (nutrient uptake, reduces erosion), increases infiltration

2. Riparian forest buffer zone along streams
   • Technically, this is supposed to be of 50m width on each side of a water channel. However, this was not observed along for most of the length of the two major streams (Huay Luang and Huay Hia) in Nong Khuay village. (See for example Figure 2.) Given that the streams were quite narrow (e.g. less than 1m in width at some points), as well as the need for agricultural land, it would not be practical for this technical requirement to be followed.
   • Benefits to watershed: Protects water quality (nutrient uptake, reduces erosion), increases infiltration, stores water

3. Leaving weeds on the ground as mulch / ground cover (Figure 3)
   • This was practised in the coffee farm and the swidden rice field. However, it was not practised on the dry paddy rice field.[2]
   • Benefits to watershed: Reduces evaporation, reduces erosion

4. ‘Gentle on soil’ upland rice farming (ເຮັດ ໄຮ່): no tilling, no compaction, no pulling out of roots, leaving the tree stumps alive (Figure 4)
   • This was practised in the swidden rice field, and is the touted by some reports as the environmental benefit of swidden cultivation.
   • Benefits to watershed: Increases soil moisture, increases infiltration, reduces erosion/landslips

 Given that the village is mainly agricultural and is located in the watershed area of the Kuang Si Waterfall, and given that 2019 was an exceptionally dry year with little rain due to El Nino, I narrowed down the focus of the participatory research to the third and fourth traditional/local practices about soil-water interactions, i.e. about having ground cover and about no tilling/compaction of the land. They were worth further investigation because they were not uniformly practised in the village.

 In early-October, we set up a Villager Research Team (VRT) comprising villagers under 35 years old (2 Khmu women and 2 Hmong women). A workshop was conducted with the VRT, during which we agreed on the hypothesis, explained the intended methods and sought inputs about the sampling sites. 

Figure 1: Forest protection area around the nam lin (village water source)

Figure 2: A steep, cleared swidden field next to the Huay Hia stream.

Figure 3: Leaving weeds on the ground as mulch / ground cover at a coffee farm

Figure 4: Swidden rice farming (ເຮັດ ໄຮ່) that is gentle on the soil: no tilling, no compaction, no pulling out of the weeds’ roots, and leaving the tree stumps alive.

Hypothesis

The hypothesis that was identified was: “Having ground-cover and the no-tilling of soil help to: (a) conserve soil moisture, (b) reduce erosion and (c) improve soil fertility.”

To investigate this hypothesis, we would need to compare various soil properties between various existing land cover/land management practices over time (see Figure 5).[3] The soil properties were: soil infiltration rate (as a proxy for soil erosion, since data collection started at the end of the rainy season), soil moisture, soil inorganic nitrates and soil texture.[4] The existing land cover/land management practices compared were:

1. a vegetable garden,
2. a regenerating bush fallow (ປ່າເລົ່າ),
3. a swidden rice field (ໄຮ່),
4. a dry paddy rice field, and
5. a forest.

Data collection was conducted from early-October 2019, which was towards the end of the rainy season, until early-March 2020, which was in the middle of the warm and dry season.

Figure 5: The objectives of the participatory research.

Methods

The sampling sites chosen are shown in Figure 6. They are chosen to be around the same area so that the underlying geology would be the same. Each sampling site represents a type of land cover/land management practice, summarised in Table 1.

Figure 6: Locations of the sampling sites.

Table 1: Sampling sites, the corresponding land cover/land management practice, whether they have ground cover and whether they are a no-tilling site.

Table 2 lists the methods used for investigating each soil property. Soil infiltration tests were conducted with the VRT conducted at-site (Figure 7). Using a soil augur borrowed from the National University of Singapore, we collected soil samples up to 1m deep, with each sample representing a depth of 10cm or 20cm. We made sure to collect soil samples from each site at the same time of the day, e.g. we always collected samples from Sites 1, 3 and 5 in the morning and samples from Sites 2 and 4 in the afternoon. Soil moisture and soil nitrate tests were done on these soil samples in the soil laboratory of the Northern Agriculture & Forestry College (NAFC), within 1.5 weeks of sampling (Figure 8). Soil texture experiments were either conducted in the village meeting house with the VRT (Figure 9) or at the NAFC soil laboratory within 1.5 weeks of sampling. An additional soil property, soil pH, was also analysed at the NAFC soil laboratory to understand the general soil characteristics and mineral availability for plants (Figure 10). Unfortunately, due to instrumentation difficulties or technical errors, not all results for soil texture, soil pH and soil nitrate from all sampling timepoints could be used.

Table 2: Methods for investigating each soil property.

Figure 7a: Setting up the soil infiltration experiment in the forest (Site 5).

Figure 7b: Conducting the soil infiltration test in the dry paddy rice field (Site 4).

Figure 8: Measuring soil moisture using the gravimetric method using the oven at the soil laboratory of the Northern Agriculture and Forestry College.

Figure 9: Evaluating soil texture using the manipulative test at the village’s meeting house with members of the VRT.

Figure 10: Measuring soil pH using the Horiba pocket pH meter at the soil laboratory of the Northern Agriculture and Forestry College.

Findings

1. General characteristics:

1a. Rock type

Pieces of rock were obtained from the soil samples. There were chalky pieces of rock from Site 1, Site 2, Site 3 and Site 4. However, rock pieces from Site 5 resembled charcoal (Figure 11).

Figure 11: Rock pieces from the soil samples.

1b. Soil pH

At all 5 sites, soil pH ranged from 7 – 8.5 (Figure 12). This was consistent with the geology of Nong Khuay village being karstic (i.e. high limestone content). The lower pH at the 0-10cm depth of soil could be because of decomposition of organic matter at the soil surface. In general, there is not much difference between sites, showing that geology plays a bigger role in determining soil mineral availability for plants.

Figure 12: Soil pH for the five sites, for the two sampling timepoints of 23-24/11/2019 and 29/2-1/3/2020.

2. Soil moisture

In terms of the hypothesis of “Having ground cover and/or no-tilling conserves soil moisture more than not having ground cover and/or tilling”, our comparison (Figures 13-15) revealed that although the Sites 2, 3 and 5 are categorised as having both ground cover and/or no-tilling, the soil moisture characteristics of Sites 2 and 5 are different from those of Site 3. This is likely because Sites 2 and 5 have more forested/shaded conditions than Site 3.

In general, Sites 2 and 5, compared to the no-ground-cover and tilled sites of Sites 1 and Site 4, are able to conserve more soil moisture for each sampling timepoint for the entire 1m-deep soil profile. Compared to Site 1, Sites 2 and 5 were able to conserve soil moisture over time. For Site 4, soil moisture did not change much over time, though this is likely because Site 4 already started off very dry, at only 10% soil moisture in November 2019.

On the other hand, soil moisture characteristics for Site 3 were not very different from Site 1 and Site 4. However, compared to Site 1, there was little change over time for the deeper layers (80cm-100cm), though this could be because this deep layer of Site 3 was already quite dry to start with, at 10-15% soil moisture from October 2019.

The above observations suggest that:

• Shade/tree cover plays a role in preventing evaporation from soil
  • Sites 2 & 5 have tree shade; Site 3 does not
• The thickness and density of ground cover makes a difference in soil moisture retention
  • Sites 2 & 5 have leaf litter; Site 3 has dried rice straw

Figure 13: Soil moisture for Site 2 (top), up to 1m in depth, for the 4 different sampling timepoints. Soil moisture for Site 5 (bottom), up to 1m in depth, for 3 different sampling timepoints.

Figure 14: Soil moisture for Site 3, up to 1m in depth, for the 4 different sampling timepoints. Interestingly, there is an increase in soil moisture in the 11-12/1/2020 sampling timepoint. As this sampling was done after the rice harvest, a possible reason could be that moisture from the rice straw has leached into the ground.

Figure 15: Soil moisture for Site 1 (top) and Site 4 (bottom), up to 1m depth, for the 4 different sampling timepoints. For Site 1, soil moisture drops over time even at the deeper layers. For Site 4, there appears to be 2 distinct ‘storage zones’ separated by a sandier layer at around 30-50cm depth.

3. Soil erosion / soil loss

We used soil infiltration rate as a proxy for soil erosion / soil loss. This is based on the model that higher soil infiltration rate translates to less surface runoff, which then means lesser mobilisation of surface soil particles by the surface runoff. In the method used to measure soil infiltration rates, ground cover was removed such that only the soil was exposed. Hence the relevant hypothesis investigated was “Having no-till increases infiltration rates hence reduces soil erosion / soil loss more than tilling”. No-tilling is represented by Sites 2, 3 and 5. Tilled soils are represented by Sites 1 and 4. Figures 16 and 17 show the soil infiltration curves for the 5 sites for 100mm of water to infiltrate into the ground.

Comparing Sites 2, 3 and 5 with Site 4, the results show that no-tilling does increase the infiltration rate. At Site 4, it could take up to 40 minutes for the 100mm of water to infiltrate into the soil.

On the other hand, when the soil infiltration rates for Sites 2, 3 and 5 are compared with Site 1, the hypothesis is disputed. Soil infiltration rates for Sites 2 and 5 were comparable with Site 1 in November 2019; however, although Sites 2 and 5 had a higher soil moisture content than Site 1, their soil infiltration rates were higher than Site 1 in the January 2020 and March 2020 field experiments. In general, soil infiltration rates were higher at Site 1 than at Site 3, although both sites have comparable surface soil moisture over time and Site 3 is slightly steeper than Site 1.

The above observations suggest that:

• Surface soil texture plays a role in influencing infiltration rates
  • E.g.: Surface soil of Site 1 is sandier compared to Sites 2 & 5. Hence, there are more pore spaces in-between when it is recently-tilled. But this does not last over the months because Site 1’s surface soil gradually gets less sandy over time (refer to Figure 18), and we see that soil infiltration rates at Site 1 does not increase over time although the surface soil gets drier.
• No-tilling is associated with less compaction of surface soils, more soil pore space, and hence higher soil infiltration rates. However, this depends on what kind of tilling is done.
  • E.g. the tilling done at Site 1 would have probably loosened the surface soil, with the likely intention of allowing for the roots of vegetables to grow more easily.

Figure 16: Soil infiltration curves for Site 1 and Site 4, for about 100mm of water to infiltrate into the ground, at various timepoints.

Figure 17: Soil infiltration curves for Site 2, Site 4 and Site 5, for about 100mm of water to infiltrate into the ground, at various timepoints. For Site 5, data collection only started on 23-24/11/2019.

A caveat for using soil infiltration rate as a proxy for soil erosion/soil loss is that it is only applicable for pre-saturated soils. Water-induced soil erosion is also affected by surface soil texture and the presence of ground cover. In terms of surface soil texture, sandy soils tend to be more easily mobilised and hence eroded. Of the 5 sites, the surface soil of Site 1 is sandy (Figure 18). Table 3 integrates the observations about soil infiltration, soil surface texture and ground cover at each site in a matrix. The site that we should be most concerned about water-induced soil erosion is Site 1. This is followed by Site 4: however, because Site 4 is flat and there is no exit point for water, there is little worry that any eroded soil (e.g. from raindrop impact) will be washed away.

Figure 18: Soil texture analysis for the various soil samples. For the scale on the vertical axis: 1 – sand; 2- loamy sand; 3 – sandy loam; 4 – loam; 5 – heavy loam; 6 – light clay; 7 – clay. Of the 5 sites, Site 1 has surface soil with a sandier composition.

Table 3: Observations about soil infiltration, soil surface texture and ground cover at each site ( “:)” – favourable, “:|” – neutral, “:(” – unfavourable)

3. Soil nitrates

Using soil inorganic nitrates as a proxy, the hypothesis investigated was “Having ground cover and/or no-tilling increases soil fertility more than having no ground cover and/or tilling”. Due to instrumentation issues, soil inorganic nitrates were measured only for the soil samples collected in March 2020.

Figure 19 shows the soil nitrates results for the five sites. Comparing Site 4 with Sites 2, 3 and 5, the results suggest that no-tilling and having ground cover increases soil fertility. The results from comparing Site 1 with Sites 2, 3 and 5 are more nuanced. Sites 2 and 5 had higher nitrate content in the surface soils, up to 20cm depth and 40cm depth respectively. However, the soil nitrate content in Site 3 was about the same as that of Site 1 for the 0-20cm layer of soil, and was then lower for deeper soil layers. It is noted that none of the sites had fertilisers applied to them.

The above observations suggest that:

1. Land use history plays a role in determining soil fertility, not just existing land use/management
   • Before Site 1 was used as a vegetable garden in 2019, corn was planted for 3 years. Prior to that, it was used as a swidden rice field for 3 years, after a 3-year fallow period. Hence, with the fallow period and re-introduction of crop residues into the soil (e.g. via green mulch), some soil nitrates could have accumulated in the soil from the past and subsequently also brought to the surface when the surface 20cm of soil was tilled. In contrast, before Site 4 was used as a rice field, it was a teak plantation for several years.

2. Soil recovery time is important for soil fertility
   • Site 5 is the most undisturbed, hence the soil can achieve good fertility.

Figure 19: Soil (inorganic) nitrate content of Sites 1 and 4 (left) and Sites 2, 3 and 5 (right).

Recommendations

In terms of improving agricultural productivity at Nong Khuay village, the following two main recommendations are made:

1. For farmers to recognise what they can change, and what they cannot change.

It is difficult to change soil pH. As such, farmers should choose to grow plants that can do well in alkaline soils. Soil pH can be lowered through composting/mulching, but due to the underlying geological conditions it is unlikely to go below pH 7.

Soil properties that can be changed include:

• Soil nitrogen à by growing legumes, by making compost/mulch, and by avoiding applying compost/fertilisers right before it rains to prevent leaching
• Soil porosity à by not compacting the soil
• Soil moisture à by providing shade, ground cover, etc.

2. For farmers to take care of the soil to stop land degradation

Due to climate change, the weather is becoming more extreme – ranging from very hot to very cold, and very dry to heavy rains. Furthermore, if soils are exposed, they can be subject to water-induced erosion or wind-induced erosion (Figure 20), leading to more soil loss, and a vicious cycle continues (Figure 21). The following insights about soil management from this study’s findings are also instructive for doing climate-smart agriculture:

1. Not simply about ‘tilling versus no-tilling’ or ‘ground-cover versus no-ground-cover’
   • Farmers should pay attention to how the tilling is done (e.g. how much to compact the soil?) and the type of ground cover
2. Conserving soil moisture
   • Methods include:
     • Shading from trees; ground-cover; etc.
     • When there’s no rain, trees/bushes can help to trap mist (e.g. Figure 22)
3. Preventing erosion
   • Important because it is also about conserving good-quality soil
   • Factors to consider: soil infiltration/porosity; surface soil texture
4. Desirable soil properties
   • Forest soil seems to be most ideal, but requires recovery time
   • We need to think about how we can recreate similar conditions for farmlands, within a shorter timespan

Figure 20: Video showing how exposed soils could be susceptible to wind-induced erosion.

Figure 21: The vicious cycle of the land degradation and the loss of soil moisture, erosion, etc.

Figure 22a: A misty morning.

Figure 22b: The leaves of plants help to trap mist.

To further the study, a sixth type of land use/management practice, pasture for cattle-grazing, could be included in the future. This was not included in our initial scoping as the participant-observation phase and the workshop did not reveal any contesting or differing practices between villagers. However, given that more villagers are increasingly transitioning to cattle-raising as a more secure income source, and that cattle-raising could have negative effects on watershed health[8], there is potential to investigate this form of land use further. Scoping such a study will need to consider that cattle-raising practices could potentially differ between households.[9]

Knowledge dissemination

The findings were reviewed, and the recommendations discussed, with 3 members of the VRT in the evening of 6 May 2020.[10] The study’s main takeaways and recommendations were then shared with the village leaders in the afternoon of 7 May 2020. It would have been ideal to conduct a workshop/awareness-raising activity about soil health for all villagers; however, this was unfortunately not done due to time constraints.[11]

During the sharing session with the village leaders, village leaders also shared the following about their existing practices and challenges with regards to soil-water management in Nong Khuay village:

• Watering crops:
  • If there is no rain, they will water their crops 1-2 times a day. This is mainly by using a watering can; if a hose is used, soil compaction could be faster.
  • Generally, there is a shortage of water in Nong Khuay village to irrigate the crops.
• Soil fertility:
  • To ‘read’ whether the existing soil is fertile, they look at the whether the natural vegetation grows well, or if the colour of the soil is black
  • Generally, the land in Nong Khuay village is not fertile.
  • If slash-and-burn is done, the land becomes unproductive after 2-3 years.
  • The best practice to restore soil fertility is to make compost. If the agricultural area is small, manure from pigs, chickens or bats can be used to fertilise the soil. However, it is more laborious for a big plot of farmland.

Conclusion

The above findings point out that the hypothesis of “Having ground-cover and the no-tilling of soil help to: (a) conserve soil moisture, (b) reduce erosion and (c) improve soil fertility” is not always true. Instead, what matters for soil health is more nuanced: the type of ground-cover and how the tilling is done. The land use history of a site also affects existing the soil structure and mineral content, and rehabilitating soils take time.

Although Nong Khuay village has two main streams, these streams are small and the extent to which villagers have harnessed them is limited.[12] This means that most farmers rely on rain-fed agriculture, which then puts them at the mercy of the weather – this was witnessed during the 2019 El Nino, when many farmers expressed difficulty with their crops due to the lack of rain. To be more resilient to extreme weather conditions, it is therefore important for farmers to take care of their soils so that they can extend the productive lifespan of their fields, for example by conserving soil moisture, preventing soil loss, and ‘feeding’ the soil with compost. These climate-smart agricultural practices will also reduce the amount of sediments and the amount of nutrients that get washed downstream, therefore benefiting the health of the watershed, which is quite sensitive in the karstic environment of the Kuang Si watershed area.

Rainfed agriculture accounts for more than three-quarters of the cropped area in the world.[13]  The soil-water management challenges that these villages face would not be too different from those of Nong Khuay village. From this participatory research at Nong Khuay village, I hope that international organisations, NGOs and community development organisations can incorporate into their programmes the need to raise awareness about the importance of taking care of soil health.

Acknowledgements

My fieldwork at Nong Khuay village would not have been possible without the assistance of Mr Siphanh Daovongdeuan, who displayed a positive work ethic, a sense of humour, and care for the villagers. His presence was always welcomed by the villagers, and he was adept at bridging the communicative gap between ‘educated project implementers’ like myself and rural villagers.

Many thanks also to the four members of the Villager Research Team, Ms Phonevilay Soukhy, Mr Oudom Soulimoungkhoun and Ms Sot Phetsamone for their assistance in the various phases of my fieldwork at Nong Khuay village. I would also like to express my thanks to Mr Phonthip Phongsavath and Mr Viengphet Panoudom of CHESH-Lao, and Ms Nguyen Minh Phuong of the Social Policy Ecology Research Institute (SPERI), for their important behind-the-scenes support; and to Dr Outhai and Mr Nou Yang of the Northern Agriculture & Forestry College for allowing me to use their soil laboratory. Much appreciation also goes to the village leader and villagers for generously hosting me during our numerous visits to Nong Khuay village.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge CHESH-Lao/SPERI for hosting me in Laos, the National Geographic Society for the funding support, my PhD thesis committee for providing intellectual critique, and my family for the invaluable the moral support. Without your trust, support, feedback and understanding, I would not be able to conduct my fieldwork in Laos.

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[1] From the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, Souphanouvong University, Luangprabang province

[2] The family explained during the workshop in October that they were concerned that leaving the weeds on the ground would cause the seeds to spread, thereby inadvertently propagating more weeds.

[3] An alternative approach of hypothesis-testing would have been to set up experimental plots, but this would have been more suitable if we had started in March/April to coincide with the season when farmers are planting in their field.

[4] The choice of soil properties was also guided by the equipment that was available to me.

[5] Adapted from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSGdAF6Dz9Y&t=199s

[6] Adapted from http://home.iitk.ac.in/~madhav/expt1.html and https://lter.kbs.msu.edu/protocols/24

[7] According to:  http://www.fao.org/fishery/static/FAO_Training/FAO_Training/General/x6706e/x6706e06.htm

[8] See for example the following documents which mention the need to improve cattle-management practices for watershed protection:

• Malmer, A., Murdiyarso, D., Bruijnzeel, L.A. and Ilstedt, U., 2010. Carbon sequestration in tropical forests and water: a critical look at the basis for commonly used generalisations. Global Change Biology, 16: 599-604.
• FAO, 2017. Watershed management in action – lessons learned from FAO field projects. Food and Agriculture Organisation, Rome.
• Springgay, E., 2019. Forests as nature-based solutions for water. In ‘Unuasylva’ (ed. A. Sarre), Vol. 70 2019/1, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

[9] See for example: Phouyyavong, K. Tomita, S. and Yokoyama, S., 2019. Impact of forage introduction on cattle grazing practices and crop-livestock systems: a case study in an upland village in northern Laos. The Rangeland Journal. https://doi.org/10.1071/RJ18102

[10] The fourth member of the VRT had gone to his field to stay over and do farming, as his field is a few hours’ walk away. Due to time constraints, we had to proceed with the discussion without him.

[11] This blog article (https://blog.nus.edu.sg/doyouloveourearth/2020/09/16/fieldwork-against-the-backdrop-of-covid-19/) explains how covid-19 had limited on the amount of time that I could spend at Nong Khuay village.

[12] At certain points of the Huay Hia stream, some villagers have diverted the water to make fish ponds. Water is also diverted away from the Huay Luang stream to irrigate a few fields. However, these villagers are lucky in the sense that their fields are located in the right topography: due to the high cost of pumps and pipes, fields at higher elevations are not irrigated. As far as I understand from my fieldwork, there is as yet no system in Nong Khuay village to regulate agricultural water distribution.

[13] Reddy, V.R. and Syme, G.J., 2015. ‘Introduction’ in Integrated Assessment of Scale Impacts of Watershed Intervention: Assessing Hydrogeological and Bio-physical Influences on Livelihoods. Elsevier.

Note: This report was originally written in end-March 2020 for the Luang Prabang Urban Development & Administration Authority. For this blog post, I have included some minor updates. 

Background

My PhD research project, “Living in a watershed: the role of traditional and local practices”, aims to understand the traditional/local practices that are beneficial for the management of the watershed area of the Kuang Si Waterfall, as well as how these practices can be retained in the future. It uses a participatory action research approach whereby villagers co-identify debatable or contestable traditional/local practices and subsequently co-examine these practices through field experiments/data collection. This methodological approach not only recognises that a researcher’s relationship with the researched is bi-directional, but also legitimises my presence in the villages to do extended participant-observation in order to understand the daily lives of the villagers.

The two villages that I focussed on were Thapene village and Nong Khuay village, from May 2019 – May 2020[1]. This report describes the data collection at Thapene village. Ms Phonevilay Soukhy[2] assisted me with most of the fieldwork at Thapene village.

Introduction

 In June 2019, a workshop (Figure 1) was conducted with several villagers of Thapene village, to gather inputs on how Thapene village manages upstream and downstream water resources. We also asked if there were any challenges with regards to water resources management that could benefit from a research process. Through another 3 trips to Thapene village to conduct participant-observation, discuss with key villagers and understand its drainage system, we decided to focus on the practice of waste management for keeping the watershed clean. This would help to raise awareness about Thapene village’s new challenges of (i) increasing waste from tourism and (ii) the non-biodegradability of plastic litter.

 Much research in recent years has shown that plastic litter can harm animals and reduce agricultural productivity. However, because plastic takes a long time to biodegrade, it would accumulate in the environment. On          e common option to get rid of plastic litter is to burn the plastic waste. This is a health hazard because burning plastic without a proper incinerator and a smoke-scrubber will release harmful dioxins. These chemicals can be inhaled or enter our waters and soil, causing cancer and birth defects in human beings. Dioxins also accumulates in the fatty tissues of animals, therefore passing on through the food chain from animals to human beings. In addition, there is ongoing research about the health hazards of micro-plastics: small particles of plastic that are produced when larger plastic pieces break apart. Across the globe, more than 95% of the plastics sent for recycling does not get recycled at all. Because 40% of plastic waste across the globe is single-use plastic, there is potential to decrease the amount of plastic waste that is produced in the first place by re-using as much as possible.

From on our conversations with the villagers, we learnt that Thapene village started a rubbish collection system in the 2000s. The two dumpsites (see Figure 2) were built with support from the Tourism Department. A village-operated rubbish collection truck collects the rubbish from the houses, shops, restaurants, guesthouses and the Kuang Si Waterfall Park. The rubbish is sent to the dumpsite(s) and burned about once a week, or whenever it is full (Figure 3). We also understand that a few villagers collect used metal cans and used plastic bottles to sell to collectors for 3,000LAK/kg and 1,000LAK/kg, respectively. Because the selling price is low, the work of collecting used plastic bottles is unattractive.

Figure 1: Workshop with villagers at Thapene village in June 2019 (Photo: Y.S. Lau)

Figure 2: Satellite view of Thapene village (Source: Google Earth)

Figure 3: Residual smoke from the burning of rubbish at the Thapene village dumpsite, while the rubbish collector shovels the rubbish on this truck into the dumpsite (Photo: Y.S. Lau)

Hypothesis

The hypothesis that was identified was: “Tourism-related activities/services has led to more waste being produced in Thapene village.” To investigate this hypothesis, we would need to compare (i) the amount of rubbish from tourism-related activities/services with (ii) the amount of rubbish from households.

Methods

The initial plan was to set up litter traps along Thapene village’s streams. The litter traps would be set up to collect litter washed down from the sub-catchment of the area where tourism activities are conducted and the sub-catchment of the village’s residential area, respective.  However, 2019 was an exceptionally dry year and the rainy season had ended by the time I was ready to collect data.

Hence, we decided to accompany the village’s rubbish collector to collect rubbish from the entire village. As the rubbish was collected, we weighed it using a weighing scale (Figure 4) and noted down whether it was from the houses or tourism-related activities/services (e.g. Kuang Si Waterfall Park, restaurants/shops serving visitors, guesthouses/hotels etc.) We also asked the rubbish collector when he last collected rubbish from each area, so that we could obtain the daily weight of rubbish. We also took photos to qualitatively assess the type of rubbish from each area.[3] The rubbish collection and weighing was done on 20 October 2019, 27 November 2019 and 6 January 2020.

As rubbish from the Kuang Si Waterfall Park is normally collected daily, we also asked the Park’s ticketing counter for the visitorship numbers on the date that the rubbish was generated. This would allow us to estimate the amount of rubbish produced per visitor per day in the Kuang Si Waterfall Park.

In addition, we also conducted interviews and house-to-house visits with more than 60 households in end-September 2019 to understand what kinds of traditional/local alternatives to plastic exist in Thapene village. During these interviews, we also informed the interviewees about the advantages and disadvantages of plastic.

Figure 4: While collecting rubbish from the village, we used a weighing scale to weigh the rubbish. (Photo: Y.S. Lau)

Figure 5: Sharing with villagers about the advantages and disadvantages of plastic (Photo: Y.S. Lau)

Findings

Based on the data collected, Thapene village produces about 600-1000 kg of rubbish per day (Table 1). Of this rubbish, 15-35% is from households, and 65% – 85% is from tourism-related services/activities.

We also found that within the Kuang Si Waterfall Park, each visitor generates about 0.14kg of rubbish (Table 2). This is almost equivalent to every 2 visitors leaving behind a full 300ml bottle of water for it to be cleared from the Park.

In addition, we observed that there was more organic waste in the rubbish from households, whereas we saw more single-use plastics (e.g. plastic bottles, foam plates/boxes, plastic straws, plastic bags) in the rubbish from the tourism-related services/activities (Figures 6 and 7). Overall, it was observed that about two-thirds of the rubbish is organic waste.

Since the Tourism Department helped to build Thapene village’s dumpsites in the 2000s, the use of plastic has increased. Plastic bags became more common in Thapene village around 1995, and were also used to re-package snacks into smaller quantities. Later, foam boxes, plastic straws and plastic cups became more common around 2010. Single-use chopsticks became more common around 2015. However, from our interviews and house-to-house visits, we found that there is still a culture of re-using plastic amongst the villagers. In addition, villagers and some businesses in Thapene village have alternatives to plastic in their daily lives/operations (Table 3). These should be given more recognition and promoted, if possible.

Figure 6: Rubbish from the tourism-related services/activities. (Photo: Y.S. Lau)

Figure 7: Rubbish from the houses.(Photo: Y.S. Lau)

Recommendations

To reduce the amount of rubbish sent to the dumpsite, Thapene villagers can make compost using organic waste and reduce the amount of plastic used. To do these, villagers need to be aware about how long each material takes to biodegrade.

Households and landowners can use organic food waste or horticultural waste to make compost or mulch. This will help to enrich the soil. They can also buy oil, shampoo and other daily necessities in larger quantities or in refillable bottles, to reduce the amount of single-use packaging.

Tourism and businesses can provide water refill stations instead of single-use plastic water bottles to their guests/customers. If possible, they should provide plastic bags and plastic straws only when people ask for them. They should also separate organic waste from inorganic waste so that the former can be used to make compost or garden mulch. Visitors should be reminded to throw away their rubbish properly to reduce the amount of litter.

Other partners (government, potential investors, businesses etc.) could provide financial assistance to subsidise the cost of biodegradable packaging, as a replacement to foam packaging. Some support could be provided to Thapene village to reduce incidental littering from the current waste management system. Examples of such incidental littering are: rubbish falling out of the rubbish collection truck when it travels on a bumpy road, and wind blowing rubbish out of rubbish bins. These could be addressed by, respectively, having a closed-top truck instead of an open-top truck, and having covers for rubbish bins. Looking upstream in the chain of production, product manufacturers should look into reducing packaging waste. Finally, as Thapene village is located about 1 hour from Luang Prabang city, villagers may not know about the latest ideas in minimising waste. Partners and friends should continually share ideas with Thapene village so that villagers are aware of possible options and feel part of the wider collective effort to reduce waste.

Knowledge dissemination

As part of the process of my PhD research, an exhibition about waste management at the meeting house of Thapene village was organised on 12-13 March 2020 to communicate the findings from my fieldwork at Thapene village. Villagers and students from the Thapene village primary school attended the exhibition (Figures 8, 9 and 10). In addition to reading the poster exhibits, they also took part in 2 simple quizzes about how long each material takes to biodegrade and why we should reduce the use of plastic. Because an earlier feedback was that villagers lacked reusable bags as an alternative to plastic bags, exhibition participants were also given reusable cotton bags which they customised through their own painting.

A workshop with was also organised on 12 March 2020 to discuss how to put possible solutions into action (Figure 11). It was attended by about 10 key villagers and two government staff from the Luang Prabang Urban Development & Administration Authority. The workshop revealed a keenness from villagers to address the issue of waste management at Thapene village. However, they need help from the government, such as through networking[11] and policy levers[12] to channel resources for addressing the issue, and to provide organisational legitimacy for initiating new programmes[13]. In addition, the key villagers pragmatically emphasised that any new programme will be self-sustainable only if there is a business case for it. The government staff shared that there is high-level political attention on the issue of waste management nationwide, and advised villagers to be specific when asking for help from external parties. They also encouraged the villagers to form small associations to make compost or biodegradable boxes for sale. Compared to other villages, the presence of the Kuang Si Waterfall is Thapene village’s geographic advantage.

Figure 8: Exhibition with villagers on 12 March 2020 (Photo: Sot Phetsamone)

Figure 9: Villagers write down what they hope for Thapene village after viewing the poster exhibits (Photo: Y.S. Lau)

Figure 10: Students from the Thapene village primary school attend the exhibition (Photo: Y.S. Lau)

Figure 11: Workshop with key villagers and government staff on 12 March 2020 (Photo: Sot Phetsamone)

Conclusion

Based on the above findings, the hypothesis that “Tourism-related activities/service has led to more waste being produced in Thapene village” holds. While tourism has helped villagers in Thapene village to improve their livelihoods, it has also introduced more rubbish – including plastic waste – into Thapene village. This rubbish is currently burned at the nearby dumpsite, and the chemicals released will be harmful to villagers and the environment. Improvements to the current rubbish collection system are needed.

However, as Thapene village develops/modernises, the use of plastic will become more pervasive in the village. This needs to be managed, such as through constant environmental campaigns to remind villagers about the disadvantages of plastic and through programmes to reinforce villagers’ traditional/local practices that are alternatives to using plastic. Villagers can also use organic waste to make compost or mulch, reducing the amount of rubbish that goes to landfill while enriching their soil.

Globally, the problem of waste management reflects mankind’s reluctance to conserve resources and take care of nature. Waste management is made even more complicated due to the presence of plastics in the waste-stream: while plastic makes our lives more convenient, it is also very difficult to manage as rubbish. We hope that villagers at Thapene village, government staff and other stakeholders can carry on the momentum from the exhibition to generate less rubbish, so that Thapene village can be a model for other villages in Laos and beyond.

Acknowledgements

My fieldwork at Thapene village would not have been possible without the assistance of Ms Phonevilay Souky, who displayed passion, strength and patient determination. She was literally willing to “get her hands dirty” and translated most of the materials for Thapene village.

Many thanks to Mr Oudom Soulimoungkhoun, Ms Sot Phetsamone and Mr Siphanh Daovongdeuan for their assistance in the various phases of my fieldwork at Thapene village. I would also like to thank Mr Phonthip Phongsavath and Mr Viengphet Panoudom of CHESH-Lao for their important behind-the-scenes support. Much appreciation also goes to the village leader and key villagers for hosting me during our numerous visits to Thapene village.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge CHESH-Lao/SPERI for hosting me in Laos, the National Geographic Society for the funding support, my PhD thesis committee for providing intellectual critique, and my family for the invaluable the moral support. Without your trust, support, feedback and understanding, I would not be able to conduct my fieldwork in Laos.

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[1] Originally supposed to be until April 2020. See my other blog post about my fieldwork against the backdrop of covid-19 in Laos.

[2] From the Northern Agriculture & Forestry College, Luangprabang province

[3] There was a suggestion to separate the rubbish as part of the analysis. However, this would pose a safety and hygiene concerns, because items such as used toilet paper and rotting food/organic waste were part of the rubbish.

[4] There was supposed to be a village-wide collection of rubbish on 27 November 2019. However, the rubbish truck broke down mid-way. Hence, data from 27 November 2019 is used to supplement the gaps in the data collected on 6 January 2020.

[5] The frequency might actually be lower for some houses that are farther away from the main road because we understand that it is difficult for the rubbish collector to access these houses.

[6] The frequency of rubbish collection is supposed to be daily at the Kuang Si Waterfall Park. However, because of a change in rubbish collector on 5-6 January 2020, two-days’ worth of rubbish was collected on 6 January 2020.

[7] In reality, the frequency might be lower, because we saw that the rubbish from one shop was teeming with maggots.

[8] Data from 27 November 2019. Rubbish was not collected from this location on 6 January 2020.

[9] Data from 27 November 2019. Rubbish was not collected from this location on 6 January 2020.

[10] The number of visitors is estimated based on the ticket revenue of 15,000,000 LAK on 19/10/2019. Each ticket costs 20,000 LAK for a foreigner and 10,000 LAK for locals. Based on observations, we assume that at least 75% of visitors are foreigners. If the proportion of foreigners is actually higher, the number of visitors decreases and so the amount of rubbish-per-visitor increases.

[11] For example, the government is aware of support programmes that villagers are not aware of.

[12] For example, the government, which processes the permits for new businesses in Thapene village, could institute a requirement for applicants to contribute towards addressing the issue of waste management in Thapene village.

[13] A key villager fed back that sometimes it is easier to organise the villagers if there is an external party initiating the programme/initiative.

“What will you be during the Lao New Year?”

“I don’t know… maybe play?”

It was the end of February 2020, and I had just arrived in Luang Prabang, Laos. I was excitedly chatting with my friend Sumiya, who was also supposed to come to Laos for her fieldwork a few weeks later.

Little did we know how naïve we were.

===

I arrived in Laos for the last leg of my fieldwork. Covid-19 had yet to rear its ugly head globally, but I needed to be careful. At the guesthouse where I stayed at, I disinfected surfaces and avoided other guests. My Lao friends were aware of this new virus, and shared with me the local perspectives. For example, there was a rumour that eating hard-boiled eggs would ward off covid-19, and so there was rush for villagers to buy eggs – causing a temporary spike in egg prices! There were not yet any covid-19 cases in Laos, because Lao people like to drink beer and the ‘heatiness’ from the beer kills the virus. And there was a joke that since there were still no covid-19 cases in Laos, it meant that although Laos is the least developed country in Southeast Asia, it has one of the most developed healthcare systems (or the healthiest/strongest people)!

At that time Singapore had one of the highest numbers of covid-19 cases after China. When Honey brought me to the market to get some groceries, the stallholder looked at me up-and-down with cautious suspicious when we told her that I was from Singapore. And, at short notice, I had to rearrange my plans to visit my field-site: the villagers were understandably worried about covid-19 and decided to ban foreigners from entering the village, so I had to delegate the fieldwork to my Lao friends assisting me.

Oudom, Bouasot and villagers collecting soil samples while
I was barred from entering the village (29 February 2020) (photo credit: Oudom)

The 1-2 weeks that followed, in early-March, were productive and happy. My friends from Vietnam visited Luang Prabang for some work, so it was a period of catching up with one another. During the day, I worked at the Northern Agriculture & Forestry College’s (NAFC) laboratory with Bouasot. Villagers at my other field-site were less concerned by covid-19 (probably because their economy relies on supporting tourism), so we were able to carry out my fieldwork plans successfully. But on 11 March, the first of our three-day fieldwork at this village, I remember Oudom telling me that the covid-19 situation in Italy had worsened. On that day, covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation.

A gathering of ladies with chi Phuong from Vietnam (29 February 2020)

Viengphet with chi Kien from Vietnam, exploring traditional Tai Lue instruments at the LPB BioBamboo restaurant (3 March 2020)

Bouasot being a great help at the NAFC laboratory! (5 March 2020)

Oudom and Bouasot with the children at one of my fieldsites, during an outreach activity that was an extension of my fieldwork. Really proud of Oudom and Bouasot! (13 March 2020)

Over the next few days, the sky was very hazy from the slash-and-burn, but that wasn’t the only thing that put a blanket of foreboding gloom during my husband’s visit. Villagers were wary of us foreigners when we did a homestay at Mr Somdeth’s place in Nam Bak district. I also received an email from the National University of Singapore (NUS) saying that students on overseas exchange programmes should return to Singapore, but I was in a grey area because my fieldwork is not considered an overseas exchange programme. When we visited NAFC to clear my soil samples, we heard from Dr Outhai and Nou Yang that schools were to be closed[1] and that Japan was recalling its volunteers in Laos.

Cycling at Ban Nayang Nua with Mr Somdeth (16 March 2020)

The sky over the Nam Khan river was orange due to the haze (end-March 2020)

Siphanh, who was back in Luang Prabang by then (his project’s team leaders had to indefinitely postpone their meeting in Vientiane because there were no flights from the Philippines), called to warn us that he had heard from his friend, who worked for Scoot, that the last Scoot flight operating out of Laos back to Singapore would be on 19 March 2020. We were perplexed – there was no notification from Scoot! We tried to contact Scoot, but all the lines were engaged, probably because of the growing confusion over international travel. Even the Singapore embassy in Laos was unaware when we checked, but shortly later confirmed that this was so. Hence my husband changed the date of his return flight. I decided to stay on, because I was so close to completing my fieldwork. Although my field-site had reinforced restrictions (now it was a directive from the district governor, hence not solely for the village leader to decide), I felt that I could wait a few weeks. My fieldwork was scheduled to end in end-April, anyway. If I returned to Singapore, I might face travel restrictions, and I felt that any disruption of a few months could break the momentum and rapport I had established with the villagers. (My supervisor also thought that it would be better, fieldwork-wise, to shelter-in-place for a while.) Moreover, there were still no covid-19 cases in Laos, so it would be worth staying in Laos to see how things evolve. The night before my husband’s return flight, we met Siphanh for dinner. Siphanh felt that it was safer to return to Singapore, due to its advanced healthcare system. I shared that, on the contrary, I felt safer in Laos – after witnessing the panic-buying when the Singapore government issued DORSCON Orange in early-February[2], I was worried about food supply disruptions in Singapore!

And so, while my husband served his 14-day stay-at-home notice after his return to Singapore[3] (although he told he immigration officers at the Singapore airport that he had a cough, he was not tested for covid-19), I used my time to sort out my data and plan for further fieldwork. I also managed to get my visa renewed in Luang Prabang. As a citizen of an ASEAN country, I was under visa-exemption, and having no physical visa document, I normally would have to re-enter the country to get a new 30-day visa. However, the officers were understanding, since they noted that there were no more flights out of Luang Prabang and that most international borders had closed, so I just paid the visa-extension fees for the next 30 days. Thankfully for this: my back-up plan was to ask Siphanh to bring me to cross the nearest Thai-Lao border, but he was unsure whether he could bring his motorbike into Thailand!

A herd of goats grazing outside the office where I renewed my visa (23 March 2020)

The first covid-19 cases were reported in the week of 23 March[4]: a group of Italian tourists were quarantined after crossing the border into Cambodia, and a few were tested positive. Contact tracing and testing found that the tour group’s tour guide, driver and driver’s wife in Luang Prabang had covid-19. Everyone was worried. I remember discussing with Viengphet how it’s possible that the virus could be widespread in Laos already; just that it has not been detected. Viengphet invited me to join him in going back to his village for the weekend, and I was quite tempted to visit his lovely family again; however, his happy tone changed drastically the next day because he had heard that he could be detained for 14 days at the district border. I decided to stay in Luang Prabang to prepare for visiting my field-site, whenever that would happen. Viengphet, who’s very committed to his family, decided to return home before the rumoured 14-day quarantine at the district border was imposed. I would not see him again until early-May.

The government recommended nationwide self-isolation[5], so I stocked up on snacks and used the CHESH-Lao office, whilst I still could. I remember looking out of the window and seeing a large group of officials, most with masks off, in the grounds of the Luang Prabang Provincial Agriculture and Forestry Office (PAFO), and thinking how there could possibly still be such a large gathering. (Later, I found out that they were attending an important meeting that had been planned some time ago.) I also remember wishing Mr Phonthip good health, in whatever Lao that I could manage, before leaving the CHESH-Lao office on what I knew to be my last day at the CHESH-Lao office for some time.

On 30 March, a 3-week lockdown started.[6] During the lockdown, I tried to stay optimistic, by focussing on analysing my field data and producing some ‘online’ Chinese language lessons for my Lao friends on Facebook. After all, many Lao people’s plans to celebrate the Lao New Year were already dampened, so I shouldn’t whine! I could not meet my friends but they were a source of updates, and we also joked about our lockdown woes. Like Viengphet, Oudom and Bopha had also returned to their villages – it made sense because it was the season of preparing the rice fields, before the start of the rainy season (marked by the Lao New Year).

Planting some seeds to keep my spirits up (31 March 2020)

When in Laos, do what the Laotians do: I tried making my own teleos to ward off the evil spirits associated with covid-19 (5 April 2020)

Meanwhile, the situation in Singapore worsened due to the high number of returnees from other countries. (For example, my friend Sherry, who is the dance captain of the Lion King UK musical, returned from the UK in end-March. After insisting to the immigration authorities that she should be tested for covid-19, she was indeed tested positive, but thankfully recovered quickly.) On 3 April 2020, the Singapore government announced that a ‘circuit breaker’ would commence on 7 April 2020[7]. It was frustrating to see news of people in Singapore taking the pandemic lightly, especially in the days before the ‘circuit breaker’ started[8]. I was also alarmed when I heard that my parents were still attending their regular social gatherings. Over in Laos, people were very cautious, not taking their health for granted: I’d learnt over social media that my fieldsite had even erected a gate at the village entrance, forbidding anyone from entering without permission from the village authorities.

My frustrated Facebook post… (6 April 2020)

However, once Singapore’s ‘circuit breaker’ started, it felt as though we were all in the same boat of having to adapt to life in lockdown: Sherry offered her first online pilates lesson over Instagram live, and my ballet teacher offered ballet lessons over Zoom. Through being isolated together, it felt that we were brought closer, regardless of which country we were in! My husband also started helping out with a food distribution programme to the disadvantaged in our neighbourhood. Apparently, some residents living on their own could not stand the psychological effects of being cooped up alone at home, so they continued to gather at the estate’s pavilions. It felt sad to think that the design of Singapore’s urban fabric – smaller homes but with daily activities extended into shared spaces like public libraries, parks and coffee shops – was the psychological Archilles’ heel to the ‘circuit breaker’. In contrast, being stuck at home in Laos typically meant staying with at least a few other family members in a relatively large compound, and even with a few plots of farmland.

But my self-motivation dipped after the Lao New Year: in response to the increasing covid-19 cases (19 cases before the Lao New Year[9]), the government had announced that the lockdown would be extended by another 2 weeks.[10] I was staying at a neighbourhood about a 20-minute bicycle ride from the city-centre and, though the local vegetable vendors started to recognise me, it was difficult to not have any sustained, meaningful conversations with people face-to-face. Furthermore, the neighbours burned plastic with their trash every evening, which I felt was threatening my health. Hence, a few days after I paid my landlord my rent (while I believe in not owing people money over the new year, he insisted that I pay him after the Lao New Year as it would bring him good luck for the rest of the year), I informed him that I would be moving out. To be fair, he did try to make things comfortable during my stay – for example, after seeing that I had started planting some seeds on my own, he set up a larger pot for me – but he could not do anything about the neighbours burning plastic. Siphanh came to help me move my things, and I passed some things like as garlic and oil to him, as my new accommodation did not have a kitchen. Benny Kong (a Singaporean who has lived in Laos for 14 years, and who runs the hotel MyLaoHome) came to pick me up in his car – it was apparently his first work-related use of his car for some time! As he drove, he pointed out the shops that had stocked up their wares for the Lao New Year celebration, only to not be able to sell them due to the covid-19 restrictions. He also shared that eateries were open in the city centre; however, dining-in was still not allowed.

My own makeshift rain gauge, measuring the amount of rainfall over the Lao New Year period (14 April 2020)

My landlord put this up at the gate as good luck for the Lao New Year (17 April 2020)

When in Laos, do what the Laotians do: I tried making my own teleos to ward off the covid-19 evil spirits (5 April 2020)

I was glad to finally have access to cable TV, and hence have more information about how the world was reacting to the covid-19 pandemic. Benny also invited me to join his family for a few meals (Bak Kut The, mookata, and a burger at Pullman Hotel!), and it was great to be able to have sustained conversations with people face-to-face again. However, the weather was unbearably hot on days without rain (reaching 40°C on some days), and when it did rain, it was inconvenient to go out to get food. As the days passed without any increase in covid-19 cases,[11] more people gradually came out on the streets – there was even a news report about traffic jam in Vientiane![12] However, large gatherings were still not allowed. I met up with Honey and Ye, who had returned from her Bangkok internship to work-from-home and who had served out her 14-day quarantine at her home. Oudom came back to Luang Prabang and passed me two bottles of fresh honey from his family’s farm. He looked like he needed a shave and a haircut! Bopha also came back from her village looking several tones darker, thanks to plentiful sunlight (Vitamin D!) from helping out to prepare her family’s ricefield.

Home-cooked bak kut teh soup with Benny’s family! (21 April 2020)

Two bottles of fresh honey delivered from Oudom’s family’s farm (3 May 2020)

I also discussed return flight options with Benny.  The only return flight option that the Singapore embassy was aware of was on 9 May 2020, and it had to be via South Korea. It was also ridiculously expensive. I remember Benny mentioned that there were talks within Southeast Asia to resume tourism, and that Thai AirAsia might operate again in early-June. However, that was still only a possibility, not a certainty, and due to personal reasons then I needed certainty. Eventually, I booked the expensive, long flight home. Despite the lifting of the lockdown in early-May, inter-provincial travel was still discouraged so Lao Airlines did not resume its domestic flights[13] – thus I had to book a mini-van to get to the Vientiane airport. I’m glad I caught that flight because, as far as I know, there are still no commercial flights in and out of Laos today.

I was so lucky to squeeze in a final visit to my field-site on 5-7 May 2020. Siphanh was a great help in making this happen. He called the village leader’s house a few times in end-April to check on whether I could go to the village. Initially, the village leader was out in the field, so his family member informed that actually the village was starting to open up to outsiders, as there were some government staff visiting to conduct a coffee-planting extension project. This corroborated with the information from a villager friend who was studying at Souphanouvong University but who was able to go back to visit his family. Finally, Siphanh managed to reach the village leader, who said that I could enter the village but that I should get a health certificate first to show that  I was covid-free. At the same time, Siphanh informed that, due to an attempted burglary at his residence, his motorbike had to be sent for repair. I started making contingency plans in case his motorbike could not be repaired in time. On Friday 1 May, I went to the Provincial Hospital, but was told that I should return the next Monday – I didn’t realise that it was Labour Day! So I spent the weekend doing whatever planning and packing I could. When Monday came, I went back to the Provincial Hospital. The parking attendant recognised me: this solo female foreigner on a bicycle. The hospital was crowded early in the morning, and I was confused about where to go to get the health certificate. Thankfully, the staff and patients/visitors were proactive in stepping forward to help me, e.g. pointing out where I should wait. Although I am Asian and have been said to look like Thai/Lao/Filipino, my bespectacled look and my dressing – and probably my confused face – still revealed my foreignness. Finally, I met the doctor, a very nice man who spoke English. He took my temperature and wrote on the health certificate that I did not have any symptoms of covid-19. The health certificate that he issued was in English, however! How would the village leader read it?!! In any case, I took my precious health certificate and got it stamped by the hospital’s director-general authorities. I was elated to be one step closer to going to my fieldsite. The same afternoon, Siphanh collected his motorbike. Things all fell into place: we were ready to go.

My precious health certificate (4 May 2020)

Fieldwork was slightly bittersweet, because I knew it was my last visit there for at least a year. We managed to gather the data I needed, though perhaps being able to spend one more day in the village would have helped yield better-quality information, given that some villagers were stayed overnight in their fields during this planting season. When the village leader found out that it was my final visit, and that I would have a long journey back to Singapore, he organised a baci ceremony for me. It involved the sacrifice of a chicken, but since I am vegetarian (but was fine with drinking the soup), Siphanh happily gobbled up the chicken. Village food is delicious! I was very touched during the ceremony (which involves village elders muttering their blessings while tying a white cotton thread around the wrist) and could not contain my tears when giving my remarks. This village, comprising the Khmu and Hmong ethnicities, was very unique in that the villagers really care for one another. We gave a presentation on the summary of my research recommendations after the meal, played a bit of petanque, and conducted the final interviews. Before we left, we said goodbye to the village leader. He told me to not forget about the village, and that he would like to maintain the connection and learn more about how the village could develop like Singapore. There was no time to expound on the downsides of Singapore past development trajectory; nor was it the appropriate context. But I understood what he meant.

Baci ceremony at the village (7 May 2020) (photo credit: Siphanh)

Having fun with petanque (7 May 2020)

Siphanh sent me back to my accommodation in the city centre, and we said our goodbyes. It was a pity that, due to the lockdowns, I was not able to go to Oudomxay to visit his very witty and adventurous mother, whom we had hosted in Singapore in February. After I cleaned up, Benny generously treated me to some Chinese food as my farewell dinner, and brought me to buy the snacks that I might need for my journey. Before I left Luang Prabang in the morning of 8 May, I got the minivan driver to wait for me at the CHESH-Lao office: I passed Ye some posters which she could reuse, left my soil auger there (I had received an email that the chartered flight to South Korea had reduced passengers’ check-in allowance by 5kg due to forecasted turbulent weather), and said a rushed goodbye to Viengphet and Mr Phonthip. Then the minivan driver brought me to the immigration office to pick up my passport (I had requested for a second visa extension), and we were on our way to Vientiane. Due to the ongoing restrictions on inter-provincial travel, the Singapore Embassy had provided documents explaining that I was going to catch a flight. It turned out that these were not needed, as the driver seemed to have prepared the necessary when checked by the authorities.

Meeting Ye at the CHESH-Lao office before leaving Luang Prabang (8 May 2020)

I arrived at the airport 4 hours before the check-in time – except for a few staff, it was completely empty! However, a large crowd started to gather just before check-in time, and it was evident that there were many people leaving Laos: the majority were Koreans (there was a pregnant lady), and there were people transiting onwards to other countries (including two cats going to the USA). I was one of the last to check-in, and slightly annoyed that check-in baggage weight above 15kg was allowed as long as we paid the excess baggage fees. If the reduction of check-in baggage allowance was really due to safety concerns over the turbulent weather, this should not even be allowed! Everyone, including myself, also had a lot of carry-on baggage.

The Vientiane Wattay International Airport a few hours before my flight’s check-in (8 May 2020)

The crowd queuing up to check-in for the only flight out of Laos (8 May 2020)

Luckily, the said turbulent weather had mostly passed by the time we boarded, and the flight arrived safely in Seoul early the next morning. I was tired, but excited to explore the Incheon airport, which probably had less than 10% of its pre-covid crowd. Likewise, the Singapore Airlines flight back to Singapore was almost empty, but I was impressed that the inflight service was still top-notch. Because I indicated in my travel declaration that I had visited a hospital overseas (for the Health Certificate), I had to fill in more forms and getting my temperature checked by the team at the Singapore airport. After a 40-hour journey, I finally reached Rasa Shangri-la Sentosa, the hotel where I served out my 14-day stay-at-home notice.

It was great to have my cousin, who happened to be on-duty at Rasa Shangri-la Sentosa that evening, ‘visit’ me – albeit in an extremely socially-distanced manner (13 May 2020)

===

In all, I was incredibly fortunate to squeeze in a final visit to my field-site. It made waiting out the lockdown in Laos worthwhile. I was also lucky to catch the flight back: whenever I see Facebook posts by foreigners who are unwillingly stranded in Laos, I shudder to think that I might have been one of them. I do miss Laos, particularly my collaborators and friends, all of whom I had to say such a rushed goodbye to.

Sumiya has not been able to go to Laos to continue her fieldwork because of, understandably, the travel restrictions imposed by NUS.  Likewise, several other PhD students in the midst of their fieldwork had to make major modifications to their overseas fieldwork plans or their original research proposal. The uncertainty of the situation increased anxiety to an already-stressful undertaking of a PhD.

In Singapore, it was heartbreaking to see the empty coffee shops in my neighbourhood during the ‘circuit breaker’ period. Coffee shops are such an iconic feature of Singaporean culture. The government offered relief packages so that jobs could be sustained for a while, but the effects on the economy are still being felt.

Likewise, the Lao economy is affected: due to the restrictions on international travel, tourism-dependent businesses are finding it hard to survive. Jobs have been cut, and graduates find it difficult to find jobs. For example, my villager friend graduated with a major in Hotel Management. As a hardworking person with excellent attitude, I thought his prospects were bright, but now he raises cows in his village for a living. Oudom had also found a good employer in the Elephant Conservation Centre at the start of 2020, but his job is currently suspended due to the shortage of funds.[14] Hopefully, the recently-launched campaign to promote domestic tourism[15] can help rejuvenate tourism-dependent businesses. But between opening up to revive the economy and remaining closed to safeguard its citizens from the global pandemic, the latter is probably the wiser choice for the country.[16]

Given that this virus started spreading because of how humans disrepect nature, as part of the recovery we should really rethink how we can better live in harmony with nature. Otherwise, what would be the point of all this emotional, psychological and economic suffering that so many people have gone through?

=== === ===

[1] https://laotiantimes.com/2020/03/17/pm-orders-preschool-and-kindergarten-closures-in-laos/

[2] https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/wuhan-virus-coronavirus-groceries-supplies-ntuc-sheng-siong-12406906

[3] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/singapore-residents-advised-to-defer-all-non-essential-travel-for-next-30-days-as-part-of

[4] https://www.who.int/laos/news/detail/24-03-2020-ministry-of-health-and-who-respond-to-first-case-of-covid-19-in-laos; https://laotiantimes.com/2020/03/24/laos-confirms-first-covid-19-cases/

[5] https://laotiantimes.com/2020/03/25/prime-minister-recommends-nationwide-self-isolation/

[6] https://laotiantimes.com/2020/03/29/laos-to-enter-full-lockdown-starting-march-30/

[7] https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/coronavirus-covid-19-lee-hsien-loong-address-nation-friday-apr-3-12605748?cid=h3_referral_inarticlelinks_24082018_cna

[8] https://www.asiaone.com/singapore/throngs-queue-outside-ikea-prior-store-closures-due-circuit-breaker

[9] https://laotiantimes.com/2020/04/12/laos-confirms-19th-case-of-covid-19-infection/

[10] https://laotiantimes.com/2020/04/15/laos-extends-lockdown-until-03-may/

[11] https://laotiantimes.com/2020/04/29/laos-controlling-covid-19-outbreak-no-new-cases-in-16-days/

[12] https://laotiantimes.com/2020/04/20/lockdown-breakdown-vientiane-population-takes-to-the-road/

[13] https://laotiantimes.com/2020/05/01/laos-to-loosen-lockdown-measures-in-bid-to-restart-economy/

[14] The Elephant Conservation Centre launched a fundraiser campaign: https://www.gofundme.com/f/eccaccelerator

[15] https://laotiantimes.com/2020/09/13/lao-thiao-lao-campaign-launched-to-boost-domestic-tourism/

[16] There have been efforts to build capacity in Laos, such as by the Chinese government (https://laotiantimes.com/2020/03/26/china-sends-medical-experts-to-help-laos-fight-covid-19/). However, due to the remoteness of villages, access to healthcare remains weak.

My friend, Sherry, tried using the iNaturalist app and wrote a user-guide. Even though we have to be “one step away from people” during this difficult period, as long as we have the internet, we still can be “one step closer to nature”!

Sherry is the strong and talented dance captain of The Lion King -UK & Ireland Tour. She returned to Singapore in end-March 2020, and was tested positive for covid-19 (you can read about her experience here). She has since recovered and is enjoying her time using the iNaturalist app.

What is iNaturalist?

the iNaturalist logo
iNaturalist is an app that allows you to record observations of any organisms (both plants and animals) that you find. Don’t worry if you don’t know what these plants and animals are! The app uses algorithms to help identify these organisms. At the same time, expert identifiers also go through your observations to help with the identification.

Using the different features of the app, you can get to know other nature enthusiasts, contribute to the biodiversity data of your surrounding environment, and who knows, you might even discover a new species of animal!

Take this time of social/safe/physical distancing to get closer to nature, discover more about nature around you with the help of this app.

Step-by-step guide to using iNaturalist

Getting started

• Download iNaturalist for free from the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store. The icon for the app should look like this:
  

  icon of the iNaturalist app

• Log in with Facebook, Google or your email address and you will come to this page. You are ready to make your first observation!
• Click on the “+” sigh (see the red arrow below):

• This box will appear for you to choose how you want to record your observations. You can take a photo of the animal/plant now, or you can upload a photo that you have taken previously as long as you remember the date and the location of your observation.

Recording your observation

• Add more pictures by clicking on this camera box (refer to the purple arrow).
  • Take pictures from different angles; for plants you can zoom in to the different plant parts such as the leaves, flowers or fruits.
  • For animals, take full body shots from different angles and close-up shots of its body parts.
• Once you have the pictures up, you can start identifying your organism! Click on the box ‘What did you see?’ (red arrow)

(P.S.: Make sure that you are maintaining a safe distance from the animal!)

• The app will give you a list of species suggestions and you can scroll down the page to choose. You can click on the various species for more pictures and information to decide what to choose.

• This is the information page of the suggested species. Swipe on the image to see more photos.

• You can also click on ‘Compare’ (red arrow) to bring your photo next to the sample photo from the guide as shown in the 2 pictures below.
  • You can zoom in for both pictures to have a closer look of the features of the organism. Swipe on the images to compare the your photos with the ones in the guide. Click on the green arrows at the bottom to switch to another species.

• If you are still uncertain, don’t worry! You can simply select the organism’s genus and the iNaturalist community will help you with identification.

Adding important information

• You can add notes to your observations (refer to the red arrow).
• The date, time and location (blue arrows) should have been automatically recorded if you took the photo using the app. If you uploaded an old picture, you have to manually input these information.
• Tick here (purple arrow) if this organism does not occur at this location naturally. For example, this plant was grown by my mother, therefore it is cultivated. Captive animals include pets and farm animals.

Your growing collection of observations

• As you collect more observations, your page will start to fill up!
• These symbols turn pink whenever you get a new identification from the iNaturalist community, and the number indicates the number of identifications for each of your observations.

How do I know that my observations are useful for scientific research?

• The Data Quality of your observation is determined by how accurate, complete and suitable it is to share to data partners.
• First you need to have a verifiable observation; meaning that your observation:
  • has a date,
  • has a location,
  • has photos or sounds and
  • is not a captive or cultivated organism.
• To start with, any observations that meet the above criteria (i.e. are verifiable) are labelled “Needs ID”.
• When 2 or more identifiers agree on the species, your observation becomes “Research Grade”.  For example, there were 3 people who agreed that my butterfly is a Lime Swallowtail.
• Your observation becomes “Casual Grade”, if the organism is captive or cultivated, for example fore for my Lemon plant (see below). Other reasons may be that your observations are not verifiable.

What other fun things can I do with iNaturalist?

• Explore (red arrow): Clicking on that brings you to the page  shown in the top right picture. You can check out the observations of other users in your area and help identify the organisms!
• Projects (green arrow): Find projects that you are interested in and contribute your observations into their database.
• Guides (orange arrow): If you are interested in exploring further afield from the comfort of your home, then this is the place to discover the stunning diversity of wildlife around the world!
• Missions (blue arrow): In case you do not know where to start, this feature gives you suggestions of organisms closeby to look for  (bottom left picture) and even show you locations of where they have been spotted previously (bottom right picture). This is an example from Singapore!

Take this time to explore nature around you: whether in your garden or when you go outdoors for a quick exercise! Have fun connecting with nature!