Nepl for cifor pes (1)

Editor's Notes

1. Today I am going to give a brief introduction about Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area and our project there. And then I will give you more in depth specifically on our ecotourism subcomponent there and our model for directly linking tourism and conservation.
2. NEPL is the largest NPA in Lao PDR. The current area is approximately 422,000 ha. With the proposed extensions, the area will be 5,959km2. Yellow is the boundary of the NEPL NPA. Red is the Core zone. The core zone is approximately ½ the total area. The yellow zone is referred to as the controlled use zone. Here local people are allowed to practice traditional agriculture, hunt non-protected species for consumption using traditional methods and collect non-timber forest products.
3. This is what Nam Et-Phou Louey looks like. It’s a very rugged and mountainous lanscape with a wide variety of forests and wildlife. This is Phou Louey mountain in the background and the Nam Et River in the lower left hand corner. The area has a very high diversity in plants and animals due to its wide range of elevations and landscapes.
4. The park has many other species of wildlife, many of which are endangered, including six species of cats (leopards, marbled cats, golden cats, fishing cat), two species of bear, civets, hog badger, porcupine, barking deer, sambar dear, and over 288 species of birds. Protecting NEPL is therefore quite important for the conservation of Laos and the region’s natural heritage.
5. Although the park does not have any villages located inside the core zone, there are 98 villages with a population of more than 30,000 people subsisting on the edge of the protected area. 6 of the districts where the NPA is are in the top 30 poorest in the country. Most people practice swidden agriculture because there is absolutely no flat land to make paddies. In the month of April, the sky is completely white with smoke. Most of the people are ethnic with the majority Khmu, Hmong, Tai and Mien, and many do not speak the national language. People and villages are spread throughout the 3 provinces and 10 districts where the protected area is located, creating an extremely large task in implementing livelihood and outreach activities.
6. Enforcement is the largest component, with 8 substations, or rangers stations, and 48 staff patrolling the forest for illegal poaching for approximately. 20+ days per month. The teams consist of 2 rangers, 3 military and one villagers.
7. Tourism is just one component of a larger project set up to protect tigers and tiger prey.
8. Here’s an example from one the projects I worked on in the south in Xe Pian NPA. One village takes tourists on elephant rides in the park. They gross at least 50K from just the elephant rides alone. The money is shared a bit within the village and with the local government, although most money goes to the owners of the elephants and the mahouts. Unfortunately, this good model of community-based tourism did little for conservation. Why?
9. So, WCS has piloted a program to address these issues and make tourism work for conservation. We piloted the program in one area of NEPL NPA called the Nam Nern River. After some initial surveys we found that the river was a possible place to see wildlife while floating down the river quietly at night.
10. In designing the project, we sought to include all of the villages that surround the tour area in order to create full cooperation with all potential hunters and full protection of the wildlife attraction. In the first year we included 9 villages and then it was later expanded to 14 to include all geographically important villages. The villages are predominantly Khmu with some Hmong.
11. The theory that we’ve employed is that the potential hunting villages should share equally in a village development fund created by tourist revenue. And this revenue must be directly linked to actually wildlife sightings by tourists. So, if wildlife sightings are up, income goes up, creating a positive, and clear incentive to local people to protect wildlife.
12. After conducting tourism awareness workshops in villages, we proposed a benefit distribution contract with each village. Every family was present in the meeting and was required to agree to and sign the contract for it to be effective. The contract simply states what villagers get from tourism and what their responsibilites are. It is a 2 page document that is written in simple (easy enough for me to read!).
13. How benefits are distributed to the village.
14. The village fund is about 15% of the total retail price.
15. At the end of each tour the tourists fill out a form to tell us how much wildlife they see. This allows us to summarize the benefits to villages and monitor increases/changes in wildlife populations in the tour area.
16. Benefits are distributed once per year at an annual tourism stakeholders meeting in each village. Villagers vote on what they want to use their money for. Although they have the option to split it up as cash, they usually choose to buy communal materials for small projects. Benefits were originally split evenly by village, but now they are split by family. This is due to large villages complaining that it wasn’t fair and the project realizing that this makes more sense since every family has equal responsibility in providing the conservation service.
17. In addition to the village development fund,
18. Each service group member is rewarded for wildlife seen by tourists, which is also a type of PES. The guides look harder for the wildlife and the service families have an extra incentive to be on good behavior when they’re in the park (they have greater access than others). They also get rewarded for good service based on tourist feedback.
19. In this picture, using local knowledge to explain medicinal plants in old village. Speaking and presentation skills. Trained 5 guides and 5 boatman. Guide criteria= explain village history, culture, distinguish different types of animals, outgoing, good health. Boatman=had a boat, ranked their engine,
20. Food: 3 meals. Lunch (fried chicken with ginger, fried glass noodles with egg and vegetables, deep fried pumpkin and taro). Dinner (sticky rice, ginger chili paste, soop pak, bbq duck, banana or taro chips). Breakfast (ginger tea, rice porridge, kao tom mat).
21. 3 huts, 2 people per hut, two toilets, one shower room.
22. Results have been positive in general, so far. Average sightings per boat have increased since our baseline year. Revenue has also increased. We still don’t have big tourist numbers though, which is the glaring issue with the program. The significance of the incentives is muted by their small nominal value.
23. In order to determine if the prorgram is truly having an impact, we’ve decided to compare threats for the sector of the park where the tour is with the other sectors of park without tourism. We can see that threats have been rising in the ecotourism sector and the other sectors, but threats seemed to flatline during the 3rd and 4th years of the project.
24. We are now planning to expand this model to other areas of the park. This year we will develop a 3-day hiking trail to the top of the highest peak in the park, Phou Louey. We also have been working with tour companies to scale up the volume for the Nam Nern Night Safari and we have been in talks with one company about a public-private partnership to operate the tour and provide additional revenue from the tour to support the enforcement team stations in the sector. Although we are implementing this project in a very remote provide of Laos with very little tourism, we are now seeing more and more interest from the private sector to be partners. Ultimately we would like to have tour companies managing these tours and paying as a rental or concession fee the cost of employing the foot patrol staff—which would be another good PES element.
25. We won the World Responsible Tourism Award in November 2013, specifically for the uniqueness of our model .