Scaling-up community-led EbA in biodiverse forest landscapes in Vietnam

With this project IIED and partners aim to reduce climate risk and improve livelihoods for farmers through upscaled EbA approaches in biodiverse landscapes in 17 communes of five provinces of Northern Viet Nam. Achieving this will involve co-developing, documenting and spreading knowledge of EbA best practices cases with and among local communities – drawing on new ‘diversification for resilience’ planning underway in established forest and farming producer organisations and building on traditional knowledge and biocultural heritage. Provincial peer-to-peer capacity building around those EbA approaches will be complemented by training to promote innovations in product labelling and marketing that incentivise EbA through improved market and finance access. A new Participatory Guarantee Scheme pilot will certify products from those landscapes that adopt EbA. Links will also be developed that reward best practice within established Vietnamese finance opportunities, such as Payments for Ecosystem Services schemes. Multi-media communication work involving both the Viet Nam Farmers Union and the Asian Farmers Association will spread uptake of lessons through established national and global networks.

Project Status

The project has documented five scalable EbA best practice cases applied by forest and farm producer organisations (FFPOs) active in the project provinces. The EbA practices thus documented include various types of agroforestry systems with long-rotation timber species, locally adapted livestock keeping systems and non-timber forest product cultivation. Each of these cases also show some diversification in income-generating options. The case studies highlight the rich biocultural heritage of local communities in Northern Viet Nam. They also demonstrate that a renewed emphasis on these locally adapted species and technologies enables local communities’ sustainable adaptation to the effects of a changing climate.

The first knowledge exchange event to disseminate findings of the case studies for 1st tier forest and farm producer organisations from the project area took place in December 2023. A further knowledge exchange event is planned for March 2024.

A participatory assessment of needs and capacities to scale up EbA across the project areas has been conducted and appropriately tailored training opportunities will be offered to forest and farm producers from March 2024.

To inspire the development of an innovative shared label for EbA-originating products, the project enabled the participation of four leaders from FFPOs at a conference where the concept of an existing shared labelling initiative in Southeast Asia was introduced to Vietnamese producers. Lessons learned from this event and shared with FFPO members served as a starting point for reflections on the feasibility of an EbA-linked labelling system among FFPOs in the project area.