Following the success of the inaugural Regional Land Forum in Hanoi in 2016, the Second Regional Land Forum was held from 28-30th May, 2018, in Bangkok. The Regional Land Forum aims to provide a multi-stakeholder platform for networking and dialogue on land governance issues across the Mekong region, particularly Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam (CLMV).
The rapid expansion of hybrid maize in the uplands of northern Laos is viewed by the government as meeting policy aims related to green economic development. Yet, growing evidence of negative consequences of maize expansion are emerging.
The European Union funded Voices for Mekong Forests (V4MF) project conducted a set of forest governance and capacity needs assessments in late 2017 and early 2018 to assess the state of forest governance in five GMS countries: Thailand, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Viet Nam.
The Grassroots Project team in the focal countries have developed posters targeting local forest stakeholders, to raise their awareness on climate change and REDD+. Each country's poster is developed in the context of the local audience.
These sets of posters comprises of simple illustrations that explain the concept of climate change and REDD+ , and the role of forests and the communities.
The posters are available in English, Myanmar language and Lao.
Agricultural large-scale land acquisition (LSLA) is a process that is currently not captured by land change models. We present a novel land change modeling approach that includes processes governing LSLAs and simulates their interactions with other land systems. LSLAs differ from other land change processes in two ways: (1) their changes affect hundreds to thousands of contiguous hectares at a time, far surpassing other land change processes, e.g., smallholder agriculture, and (2) as policy makers value LSLA as desirable or undesirable, their agency significantly affects LSLA occurrence.
ABSTRACTED FROM EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: More than ten years after its original formulation, the Lao government is now questioning the effectiveness of the “Turning Land into Capital” (kan han thi din pen theun) policy in generating economic value from the commercialization of land, facilitating local economic development, and reducing state spending on infrastructure.
WEBSITE INTRODUCTION: This report presents a synthesis of the main findings from case studies carried out in six countries in Africa (Ghana, Sierra Leone, United Republic of Tanzania and Zambia) and Asia (Laos and Philippines). The findings were disseminated and discussed in multistakeholder initiatives at regional and country level. The report illustrates how poor rural women and men are affected differently by agricultural investments, and demonstrates that they may not benefit equally from emerging opportunities.
As Chinese investment in foreign land and agriculture expands dramatically worldwide, a growing body of research has emerged on the prevalence of land deals in Latin America and Africa. Southeast Asia, however, has only recently begun to receive significant attention in these discussions. A deeper exploration of the Southeast Asian context offers crucial insights into understanding the puzzle of global land deals (why, where, how they occur) more broadly.
Increasing global demand for natural rubber began in the mid-2000s and led to large-scale expansion of plantations in Laos until rubber latex prices declined greatly beginning in 2011. The expansion of rubber did not, however, occur uniformly across the country. While the north and central Laos experienced mostly local and smallholder plantations, rubber expansion in the south was dominated by transnational companies from Vietnam, China and Thailand through large-scale land concessions, often causing conflicts with local communities.
The residents of the Ganges and Mekong River deltas face serious challenges from rising sea levels, saltwater intrusion, pollution from upstream sources, growing populations, and infrastructure that no longer works as planned. In both deltas, scientists working for nearly two decades with communities, local governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have demonstrated the potential to overcome these challenges and substantially improve people’s livelihoods.
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