The struggle over Lao PDR’s forests: New opportunities for improved forest governance?

  • Climate change
  • Deforestation drivers
  • Ethnic minorities and indigenous people
  • Forest cover reporting
  • Forest policy and administration

The forests of Lao PDR have dramatically diminished in recent decades. The main drivers of deforestation are changes in land use with forests being converted to agriculture, hydropower, mining and plantations. The main drivers of degradation are legal and illegal logging, especially salvage logging and pioneering shifting cultivation. Underlying drivers are poverty, weak governance and corruption, poor law enforcement and limited capacities as well as unclear, often contradictory legislation and the international demand for timber, rubber, food, electricity and minerals. The situation regarding forest governance, however, seems to slightly improve starting in early 2016. After years of little or no progress in terms of REDD+ the country prepared a proposal to receive performance-based payments which has been accepted into the FCPF Carbon Fund. Lao PDR also entered into the EU-FLEGT negotiations. A new government, which has been in office since early 2016, is increasingly trying to combat illegal logging and timber exports.

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The struggle over Lao PDR’s forests: New opportunities for improved forest governance?

The forests of Lao PDR have dramatically diminished in recent decades. The main drivers of deforestation are changes in land use with forests being converted to agriculture, hydropower, mining and plantations. The main drivers of degradation are legal and illegal logging, especially salvage logging and pioneering shifting cultivation. Underlying drivers are poverty, weak governance and corruption, poor law enforcement and limited capacities as well as unclear, often contradictory legislation and the international demand for timber, rubber, food, electricity and minerals. The situation regarding forest governance, however, seems to slightly improve starting in early 2016. After years of little or no progress in terms of REDD+ the country prepared a proposal to receive performance-based payments which has been accepted into the FCPF Carbon Fund. Lao PDR also entered into the EU-FLEGT negotiations. A new government, which has been in office since early 2016, is increasingly trying to combat illegal logging and timber exports.

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Document type

Reports, journal articles, and research papers (including theses and dissertations)

Publication date

2017

Publisher

Pacific Geographies

Access and use constraints

The Pacific Geographies (PG), ISSN 2196-1468, is the peer-reviewed semi-annual publication of the Association for Pacific Studies (Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Pazifische Studien e.V., APSA). From 1992-2012 it was labelled Pacific News (ISSN 1435-8360). It is published through the Department of Human Geography of Hamburg University, Germany. It is an open access journal, all articles can be downloaded for free. PG is listed at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). There are no submission or APC charges. The authors retain copyright. Copyright & Licensing: CC BY-NC-ND.

Copyright

Yes

License

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Author (individual)

Sebastian Koch

Language

English

Date modified

24 Jul 2018