Seed Project: Planning a prosperous forest-infrastructure-matrix

This seed project will explore the benefits and tradeoffs from infrastructure development for local communities in Lao PDR who use tree resources. Roads and railways lines are expanding rapidly in the country, and it remains unclear who wins and who loses from this development. Together with partners from the Lao Forestry Research Center and Bioversity International, we will co-develop approaches to understand and assess how far livelihoods are impacted by or benefit from infrastructure development when it comes to use of forest and tree resources in rural to peri-urban landscapes. A particular focus will be on the role of maps and aerial images as planning tools to understand forest cover changes and how they are perceived at local and national scales.

We will compile new and existing maps and spatial data to illustrate the link between road and railway development and forest cover changes at national and regional scales. Further, we will engage with local communities and try to capture their tree-use realities on the ground with the help of drone-based participatory mapping. We will engage in focus group discussions with people along a gradient from urban to rural to assess their interpretation of the forest and landscape changes related to infrastructure development. We will initiate a co-learning process about spatial planning procedures that integrate socio-economic needs, conservation and restoration in forested landscapes. The outcome will be an evaluation of the preconditions for a prosperous forest-infrastructure-matrix that can lead to further applied research on how infrastructures can contribute to just forest transitions where decrease turns to increase in forest cover.

Partner: external page Laotian Forestry Research Center, external page Tree Diversity for Resilient Landscapes at the Alliance of Biodiversity and CIAT