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 of income generation option. 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. Several social media and online content developed based on these best practice examples further publicise the role and investment effort by smallholder forest and farm producers in climate change adaptation as well as concrete steps supporting organisations and authorities should take to create an enabling environment for locally led EbA efforts.

To inspire the development of an innovative shared label for EbA-origin products, the project enabled the participation of four leaders FFPOs at a conference introducing the concept of an existing shared labelling initiative in SE Asia 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.

A 2nd knowledge exchange event to disseminate findings of the case studies as well as to share knowledge on innovative marketing strategies to expand market access for products originating from EbA production systems was held in May 2024, involving representatives of forest and farm producer organisations (FFPOs), national and subnational government authorities, farmer union representatives from all levels, supporting organisations as well as private sector actors. The latter had the opportunity to discuss concrete new business collaborations with FFPOs on selected value chains.

To scale up market access for EbA origin products an in-depth assessment of key stakeholders, the regulatory framework, value chain opportunities, market demand, opportunities and access for the adoption of collective biocultural heritage label or PGS has been carried out. This assessment has enabled the design of concrete marketing strategies for five FFPO value chains, which include bamboo shoot, medicinal plants, honey as well as diverse fruits and vegetables.

A participatory assessment of needs and capacities to scale up EbA across the project areas has been conducted..

Due to bureaucratic obstacles the project is wrapping up in March 2025 before all planned activities can be implemented. Results and learnings from the project will be made public.