Forest Tales? Unravelling Divergent Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC) Maps and State Narratives in Vietnam’s Northern Uplands

Thinh An Nguyen, Hung Le, Patrick Slack, Margaret Kalacska and Sarah Turner ()
Additional contact information
Thinh An Nguyen: Faculty of Development Economics, VNU University of Economics and Business (UEB), Hanoi 100000, Vietnam
Hung Le: Water Resource Management, Hanoi University for Natural Resources and Environment (HUNRE), Hanoi 100000, Vietnam
Patrick Slack: Department of Geography, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 0B9, Canada
Margaret Kalacska: Applied Remote Sensing Lab, Department of Geography, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 0B9, Canada
Sarah Turner: Department of Geography, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 0B9, Canada

Land, 2024, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-23

Abstract: The Vietnamese state has advocated for the sedentarization and market integration of upland northern farmers over the past thirty years, leading to both agrarian and forest transitions. This article presents a comprehensive land use and land cover change (LULCC) analysis of two adjacent upland borderland districts, Phong Thổ and Bát Xát, in northern Vietnam, spanning two neighboring inland provinces, Lai Châu and Lào Cai. These districts are primarily home to ethnic minority farmers who are encouraged by Vietnamese state officials to not only protect forests but to also transition toward cash crop cultivation from less intensive semi-subsistence agriculture. Our LULCC maps, covering the period from 1990 to 2020, revealed a reduction in the speed by which closed-canopy forests were disappearing. During interviews, state officials were confident that this was due to a range of state policies and state-sponsored initiatives, including the promotion of tree crops and payments for forest environmental services. Our own fieldwork in the region suggests other factors are also supporting this decline in deforestation rates, rooted in ethnic minority farmer livelihood decision making. Some state officials were also able to point to factors hindering a more positive result regarding forest cover, including population pressure and new infrastructure. Interestingly, despite our positive findings on Land use and land cover change (LULCC) related to forest cover, one-third of state officials, upon reviewing our LULCC maps, firmly maintained that errors had occurred. Some even proposed that there was an actual rise in forest cover. Our study shows that these discrepancies raise compelling questions about officials’ political motivations and ongoing pressures to uphold the central state’s reforestation and agrarian transition discourses.

Keywords: land use land cover change (LULCC); forest cover; Vietnam; ethnic minorities; livelihoods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/13/1/71/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/13/1/71/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jlands:v:13:y:2024:i:1:p:71-:d:1314616

Access Statistics for this article

Land is currently edited by Ms. Carol Ma

More articles in Land from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().