Vietnam’s Gia Lai rapidly expands forest cover
THE Vietnamese Tay Nguyen (Central Highlands) province of Gia Lai has been growing new forests and protecting existing ones in recent years to expand forest cover and improve people’s livelihoods.
Gia Lai province borders Andong Meas and O’Yadav districts in Cambodia’s Ratanakkiri province.
The province, which has the largest forest cover in the Tay Nguyen region, planted nearly 25,300ha in 2017-2020, 6.3 times its target.
In Mang Yang district’s Hra commune, the Hra Protective Forest management board allocated more than 6,300ha of forests last year to individuals, households and communities to exploit while also protecting them.
Nguyen Van Chin, head of the board, said besides planting and protecting forests, the board focuses on advocacy activities to enhance awareness of households and communities living near forests of the need to protect them.
Together with local authorities it organises advocacy activities to annually reach around 1,500 people in the commune’s 12 villages.
With these and support for illegal loggers to overcome their family’s financial difficulties, it has managed to stop the logging and make loggers forest guardians.
Duong Xuan Kiem used to be an illegal logger but is now the head of a forest protection group in the commune.
He and others used to cut down forests to sell wood to feed their families, but after receiving help from the board to stabilise their lives, they have become forest protectors, he said.
His group protects 400ha of natural forests.
Last year the province Department of Agriculture and Rural Development gave him an award as an exemplary forest protector.
Seeing the good examples set by the former illegal loggers, other residents in the commune have also stopped cutting trees and are instead keen to be allotted tracts of forest for protection.
The money authorities pay them for this task helps them have a stable life.
Krong Chro district is one of the localities to do well in growing and protecting forests through advocacy.
Nguyen Lam, deputy head of its forest protection bureau, said the district organises meetings in villages to encourage people to grow trees on deforested lands.
“The new forests are growing well, creating jobs and improving people’s incomes.”
There were nearly 200 households in the district registering to grow nearly 400ha of new forests last year, according to the bureau.
Around 700 households in the district, mostly ethnic minorities, registered to plant trees on nearly 2,250ha in 2017-2019, comfortably higher than the target the province People’s Committee set the district.
The province’s Forest Protection Subdepartment has petitioned the government to increase the fee paid to ethnic households for forest protection.
Gia Lai wants to increase its forest
cover rate to 47.5 per cent by 2025.
It has 633,325ha of forests now, including 543,131ha of natural forests, according to the department.
But another 146,636ha of former forest lands are denuded of trees.
WHAT to do if you are a windsurfing enthusiast in a country where the sea freezes over for months of the year?
For a group of Finns, the answer is to kit out sailboards with skates and take to the ice, reaching speeds of up to 100km/h in a burgeoning sport that can only be practised in a handful of places around the world.
“I call them happiness machines,” Feodor Gurvits says, pointing to his self-made board which sits on three blades and has a windsurfing sail attached.
“They really make people smile, and it’s such a joy, pure movement.”
Good grip required
Gurvits and around half a dozen fellow ice-surfers are soon cris-crossing the expanse of Baltic Sea ice off Helsinki’s Hernesaari coastline, kitted out in crash helmets and body padding in case the blades slide out during a tight turn.
“It will hurt your hands and you have to have a good grip on the boom, but otherwise it’s quite easy on the ice compared to summertime,” Esa Harjula says.
Harjula regularly teaches the sport to groups of beginners, and says there has been increased demand in recent weeks.
“It’s so great to see people learning, how they can get it in a few minutes.”
At 30cm thick, the ice is currently strong enough to drive a “small truck” on, Gurvits says – although the warm sunshine and temperatures of plus 5 degrees Celsius mean that it is starting to melt along the shallower shoreline.
Enjoy the feel
Ice surfer Mete Ciragan clocked up today’s speed record of 71.6 kph in light winds of 8m per second.
“It feels great and you forget to breathe sometimes,” he says. “But you need to concentrate on the surface so you don’t hit a bump and fall.”
“With a lighter wind you can go much faster than on the water, because there’s so much less resistance,” adds Marianne Rautelin, a former European windsurfing champion who also started surfing on ice in 2009 and has since notched up winter championship wins.
Rautelin, who regularly surfs with her husband Ian and the pair’s adult daughter Riina, says she cannot choose a favourite between water or ice.
“The attraction in summer is that the waves make it more challenging, but in winter you can just start racing straight away,” she says.
Gurvits estimates around 1,000 people currently practise ice windsurfing, of whom about 20 perform at the top level, mainly spread across the Nordics, Baltics and Poland, as well as the US, Canada and Russia.
In 2017, he fulfilled his dream of winning the World Ice Sailing Championship but says he’s not packing his board away yet.
“My ambition is to keep sailing, enjoy the feel, try to build better gear and be competitive, and try to keep other people happy as well.”