Pu Luong Ecotourism Project

Rice paddy terracing is common in Pu Luong

Pu Luong Nature Reserve is a gorgeous limestone karst landscape just three hours by car from Hanoi, home to Thai and Muong ethnic minorities, as well as a well preserved, but exploited forest system, home to the critically endangered Delacor's Langur.

It's a lush landscape

As with many similar landscapes and communities, there are considerable threats from land encroachment, population growth and development that forces the local community to exert increasing pressure on the natural resources that they rely on for their livelihoods.  Forests are becoming degraded thus threatening local livelihood security as well as biodiversity.  Additionally, large scale tourism development has been mooted by the Provincial People's Committee and associated departments, development that would significantly alter the character of the landscape, damage natural resources, place increasing pressure on biodiversity, whilst at the same time further marginalizing the local population.

Community members in consultation workshop

Up to 4,000 international tourists visit the site annually, mostly on pre-booked trekking packages with adventure travel companies, who subcontract to in-bound operators, who in-turn subcontract to a local operator.  Some local homestays have been created by a previous NGO project, but problems exist with theequitable distribution of profits from the tourism product, to an extent where tourism provides only negligible financial gains to the community.  Thankfully, a forward thinking project funded by Irish Aid allows for a comprehensive and well planned ecotourism (or perhaps "cultural tourism") project to be developed in the Nature Reserve.

My role was to lead and capacity build a national team from Fauna and Flora International through the ecotourism process to develop an equitable and pro-poor ecotourism plan to guide the two year project.  This was completed in five main stages:

1. Meeting with provincial, district and commune decision makers

Water wheels for irrigation and power generation

We held formal meetings with key provincial departments in Thanh Hoa City, to introduce our project objectives and needs.  This was followed up with meetings at District and Commune level, to ensure all were clear about the project and it's purpose.

2. Conducting an extensive tourism resource survey in the nature reserve

The team travelled extensively throughout the nature reserve, meeting local communities, observing key social, cultural and natural features, and other tourism related resources and issues.

3. Holding in-depth community consultations

Rice paddy on the valley floor

The project was centred around the needs and wishes of the 3,000 people that live in the reserve, and these communities are the key draw factor for tourists.  We held workshops in each village to allow communities to make informed decisions about the type of tourism development they would like to see in their landscape.  This valuable information showed communities did not wish to see large scale investment or landscape change affect them -this would be the key information used to develop the plan, and provide a strong argument against heavy development from provincial agencies.

4. Developing an equitable ecotourism plan for Pu Luong

The plan identified 18 key action points to achieve comprehensive sustainable and equitable ecotourism in the nature reserve.  Of these, the following were identified as priorities:

Ladies carrying fuel wood

• Develop and implement tourism zoning and management (using Recreation Opportunity Spectrum methodology)
• Implement guidelines, codes of practice and regulations to ensure low-impact and equitable tourism
• Establish and support a community tourism association
• Develop local Value Chain to add-value to tourism
• Work with in-bound and local tourism operators to ensure they allow more financial benefits to reach local communities
• Implement entry fee system to fund conservation activities
• Develop small scale handicraft programme, utilizing existing skills and products
• Implement tourism awareness training to key stakeholders

5. Developing, discussing and agreeing next steps in a multi-stakeholder workshop

The team ran a final consultative workshop with key stakeholders including nature reserve managers, tour operators, provincial decision makers and local communities.  Here, wishes of the local communities were presented along with the above action points.  Discussions were held, and pledges made for support, and importantly, approval was publicly agreed to support the plan.

Village consultation workshop

A year later and the project is going strong, with key milestones having been met, with a local community tourism association set up, various trainings completed and improvements in the value chain from support of tour operators.

Key challenges as always remain the large number of provincial agencies that are responsible for management of different aspects of the nature reserve, big business pressurizing inappropriate development for the site, and local capacity to ensure project momentum is maintained.

Click here for pictures.

Sustainable Tourism Development for UNDP Con Dao Sustainable Use Project

Con Dao has many undeveloped beaches

Con Dao is a small group of islands off the southern coast of Vietnam, and was once home to the notorious "tiger cages": prisons where political and regular criminals were held during the French and American times.  The island is unusual in Vietnam conservation terms, as it has a relatively low level of poverty and subsistence fishers and farmers due to the high government population (it is also a military garrison).  Con Dao has a surprising level of marine biodiversity in Vietnam, with possibly South East Asia's best Turtle nesting beaches, a small population of Dugongs, as well as Dolphins regularly visiting its waters.  There is a good amount of coral and reef associated species.  The island is also home to a crumbling French colonial town that is rapidly being replaced with modern buildings.

Park Patrol Boat

My role within the project was to represent WWF in providing sustainable tourism advice and input into the development of the Management Plan for Con Dao.  This involved working closely with the National Park Authority, stakeholders and other Tourism Development planners working in the islands.  As part of my work I identified key project interventions and a system of marine wildlife viewing, water-sport and tour guiding regulations and codes of practice.

Click here for pictures.

Nui Chua Sustainable Tourism Plan

The park has interesting geological features

Nui Chua is a beautiful National Park and Marine Protected Area situated in Ninh Thuan Province, on the south-central coast of Vietnam.  It consists of Vietnam unique dry forest with a mountainous landscape that includes large glacial deposited boulders.  It is home to a population of 2,000 Rag Lai ethnic minorities, as well as a significant population of Black Shanked Douc Langurs and considerable birdlife.  The park is under serious encroachment pressure from the surrounding population living in the Park's buffer zone, and has a plethora of heavy development projects targeted, many already approved by government.  The park also has a significant problem with goats introduced by a previous NGO project.

Squid fishing in the core zone

Proposed developments include:

• 750 room hotel and casino "ecotourism" complex, located in the centre of the core zone, on Nui Cuha mountain, the namesake of the Park.
• 1,000 room resort complex and golf course on the Park's northern beach.
• Road building through the core zone for tourism.
• Two 250 room hotel/resort complexes in the southern part of the park.
• Vietnam's first Nuclear Power Station

I was requested by WWF to lead a small team to compile a sustainable tourism plan for the National Park Management Authority and the Provincial People's Committee to strongly discourage the proposed developments for the national park and to suggest what perhaps may be considered as more appropriate alternatives.

Turtle nesting beach

Developing the plan had three main stages:

1. Gathering development information from provincial departments

2. Conducting site visit, rapid biodiversity assessment and community consultations

We conducted community consultations in the 4 communes within the Park and Buffer Zone.  This was to establish what changes they would like to see in their landscape, and what tourism activities, accommodation and infrastructure they considered appropriate.  The community clearly did not support massive development, but did seek improvements in livelihoods.

Map planning

3. Drafting outline plan

Naturally the plan called for provincial decision makers to reconsider large development projects, perhaps relocating them outside of the National Park.  20 detailed action points were suggested, the priorities including:

• Implement clear development zoning and regulations for the Park
• Ensure heavy development was situated outside of the core zone, with the park used for recreation and light tourism supported by local communities
• Implement tourism awareness training for key stakeholders
• Setting up a forum where local communities were informed of, and involved in all tourism development planned for the Park
• Set up a marketing team to encourage visits from the adjacent Nha Trang Hub
• Provide support to local entrepreneurs wishing to become involved in the tourism industry

4. Delivering the plan through a formal provincial level workshop

A Vietnamese meeting room is
not complete without Uncle Ho

Key challenges in a project such as this is to maintain good-will with partner agencies, especially the Provincial People's Committee and the National Park Management Authority, who supported and sponsored the heavy development in the park.  Clearly from the start, WWF could not support such development in a national park.  However, support from the local community favoured less intensive development, although there was a strong wish to create local employment.  At the present stage, little development has so far taken place, though a community has been relocated from the northern beach, pending construction.  Where plans to build the casino resort and road in the core zone have been scrapped, it is likely that construction of the nuclear power station will go ahead within the next decade.

Click here for pictures.

Feasibility Study to develop tourism hub in the North Tonkin Gulf Marine Protected Areas

Quan Lan Beach, Bai Tu Long

An important goal of destination development is extending visitor stay to an area.  The North Tonkin Gulf in Vietnam contains Two National Parks, a World Heritage Site and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, all with marine components.


Currently they are all marketed separately, often in a way that ignores one another.

The IUCN funded study conducted a detailed tourism situational analysis of Bai Tu Long Bay National Park, Cat Ba National Park, Ha Long Bay World Heritage Area and Cat Ba Man and Biosphere Reserve.  Potential tourism linkages were identified, and a strategy for inter-agency and inter-province dialogue and communication was developed.

Empty coal barges travel to the mines

The study showed that without the need for significant investment, it would be possible to increase the average stay in the area from 1.4 to 2-3, using the Ha Long Bay World Heritage Area (Vietnam's most visited and financially stable attraction) as a central marketing hub.

Click here for pictures.

The EcoBoat Project, Ha Long Bay

The EcoBoat

EcoBoat is an environmental education project that aims to take local groups of students out into Ha Long Bay and put them through a basic awareness raising programme that instills a sense of pride and thus help conserve the future of the bay.  The project was funded by the UK Darwin Initiative due to the sustainable financing mechanism, which involved taking paying trips from regional international schools on multi-day trips into the bay on environmental education and outward bounds style excursions.  This was specifically targeted at schools' "activity week".

Hanoi International School

My role was to coordinate project activities, develop the international education curriculum, and capacity build project staff in outdoor education, group leadership and safety skills, as well as to lead international trips, travel to countries in the region on marketing trips and to work with the Ha Long Bay Management Department to institutionally develop the project.  I worked for the best part of two years on the project, being based in Ha Long City.

Successes were made in developing educational methodology and style within Ha Ling Bay Management Department and the local education department.  Education is very "top down" in Vietnam, where the teacher has the knowledge and gives it to the student without question (for example, during an initial workshop with local teachers, I began with asking the question "what is conservation?", to which a comment was "he doesn't even know what conservation is! he's asking us!".  Staff became proficient in facilitating student lead discussions and practical learning.

Not all work: Tug of War on Soi Sim

Partnerships were made with international schools in Hanoi and Singapore, with various projects being run in cooperation with local schools (such as the mangrove rehabilitation project).

Thousands of local students experienced a different type of environmental education in a beautiful environment, as well of hundreds of international students learning about the effects of human impacts on the environment.

As well as these successes, I was aware from the outset that the project had considerable challenges that would take considerable effort to overcome, and ultimately caused me to leave the project early to pursue my consultancy:

• The sustainable financing mechanism was based upon assumption not research - there is a high competition for "activity week" providers in the region ho offer a highly professional service.  The bottom line for international school parents is cost, for the most they pay high fees and did not see why they should pay a premium to support free trips for others.
  
• The total reliance on Ha Long Bay Management Department's boat, staff and crew was too inflexible to provide a slick product as demanded by the client group.  Issues such as alcohol consumption and safety were always a concern in a potentially dangerous environment.  Project staff and crew were often unable to attend basic safety training and drills due to other commitments.
  
• Staff retention would always be an issue at the end of the project without sustainable financing.  When initial funds ran out, and the project was transferred to local government operation and salaries, the highly trained project staff simply moved on, thus removing the key asset of the project.
  
• Perhaps overall, the project would not actually tackle the issues affecting the bay, which were, and will continue to be damage to environmental systems through rapid and ill-managed development (specifically the water composition in the bay has been altered by the removal of hundreds of square kilometres of mangrove forest, that has thus killed all of the bay's coral).  School children would have little ability to influence the bays development in the immediate future.

Mangrove lesson

At the end of the project, after a gap of six months, funding and thus activities were resumed with the support of the Australian Santos Corporation.  Sadly, the Ha Long Bay Management Department had decided to drop the EcoBoat from its portfolio citing lack of funds - international development money is hard to obtain for Vietnam's most visited and richest protected area.

Click here for EcoBoat pictures and here for Ha Long Bay pictures.

Sustainable Tourism Adviser for Hon Mun/Nha Trang Bay Marine Protected Area Pilot Project

Hon Mun Island, the MPA Core Zone

I first came to Vietnam as a professional Volunteer with the UK based charity VSO.  My two year assignment was the Hon Mun Marine Protected Area Pilot Project in the sunny Vietnamese seaside town of Nha Trang.  The four year project was implemented under IUCN using the project staff sets up and capacity-builds a local management authority method.  Funders included the Global Environment Facility, the World Bank and Danida.

Colourful Corals

The waters of the MPA contained very high diversities of hard and soft coral, as well as abundant marine life.  However, fisheries were declining, and biodiversity and thus livelihoods being lost rapidly.  The project sought to tackle these issues.

My role was as the Sustainable Tourism Adviser to project and MPA Authority, with a specific task of working with the five communities living withing the nine islands that made up the marine protected area, a total of 5,000 people.  

Nha Trang City Beach

I worked with my Vietnamese counterparts within the MPA Authority, ran regular training in sustainable and ecotourism, worked with the local commercial sector, developed tourism micro-projects in the bay, developed interpretive materials and a visitor's centre and worked on tourism training programmes in the island communities.  The project introduced me to the trials and tribulations of the development and NGO sector, as well as the difficulties of working in Vietnam.  I worked with some fabulous local counterparts, built large stone models of coral, worked with a Tourism Professor from my home University in the UK, and got to witness the transformation of a provincial town into a major tourism destination.  And I did get to work with a BBC film crew on the Really Wild Show, and met Michaella Strachan (and took her dancing to the sailing club!), as well as meet some of the worlds leading figures in marine conservation.

Diving

Key tourism activities included the ubiquitous budget party boat trip, small scale beach day resorts, the occasional jet-ski and Vietnam's largest diving destination. 



With retrospect, the main problem of the project was that it failed to take into account its setting.  It was a rural marine conservation project designed for rural communities, not Vietnam's premier and fastest developing beach tourism site.

Boats being serviced before the Tet holiday

For example, a quarter of the budget was spent on sustainable aquaculture projects - villages and aquaculture cages were relocated by the provincial authorities to gain access to the "Most Beautiful Bays in the World Club".  Much emphasis was placed upon the micro-credit scheme, which saw slightly bizarre results including local residents being persuaded to purchase cows (no grazing land available), pigs (pigs died because they were kept in a barrel without light to prevent theft - no training), rabbits (dying due to alcohol poisoning and starvation - rabbits arrived before training), ostrich farming (thankfully this one didn't happen), purchase of bigger fishing nets and lobster fishing, sport net manufacture (people earning 15 cents a day), rattan basket weaving (supported by a local factory, but no mechanism to continue after project funding ended)... and so on.

Scuba diving boats

For my work, as Sustainable Tourism Adviser with a remit to work with local communities, the biggest challenge was the MPA Authority, who wanted to develop their own mainstream tourism business that had no place for local community members.  What was not mentioned in the project description was that four of the communities were living on an island that belonged to the military, and no tourism activities were permitted to take place there.  Also, the provincial development plan stated that all people living within the MPA would be relocated over the course of the following five years, with the islands to be sold off and developed as tourism resorts.

Mr Hien's grandchildren, Hon Mot

Tourism has since boomed in Nha Trang as it has become a popular destination with Vietnamese tourists.  Islanders have been relocated from most villages, and various tourism resorts have been constructed or are in the planning stage throughout the MPA.  The core zone of Hon Mun remains heavily over exploited by tourism, as no curbs have been placed upon tourism numbers, type or activity, and local fishers appear to have been allowed in to fish within the core zone.  Local dive operators have tried to create a dive association to challenge the MPA Authority, but as made little progress: competition is fierce and Nha Trang remains one of the cheapest places in the world to dive.  Click here for pictures.