LookAtVietnam – The Indochina program manager of Bird Life International has warned inappropriate infrastructure development is the biggest threat to special-use forests and biodiversity in Vietnam.

“If you want to destroy a forest, the quickest way to destroy the forest is to build a road through it,” Eames said. “Once you build the road, you open the area up for development.”

He also expressed concern over hydropower projects because of their impact on the river ecosystem and forests. “Once you build a dam, you destroy the forest because you need to build a reservoir that submerges an area of the forest and also disrupts the flow of a river.”

Eames pointed out the dam at the Chu Yang Sin National Park as one of the examples of the inappropriate infrastructure projects that affect the biodiversity of the park, which covers 59,278 hectares of rolling hills and mountain forests.

He said the Chu Yang Sin was internationally important because the animals, plants and birds found there were uniquely of the Central Highlands and were not discovered in anywhere in the world.

On the same side, Huynh Tien Dung of WWF Greater Mekong said infrastructure development was posing major threats to the forests and their biodiversity in Central Truong Son Mountain Range in Central Vietnam as the organization’s surveys show.

The biodiversity corridor initiative coordinator of WWF Greater Mekong told the Daily on the phone on Thursday that a road would cut connectivity of a forest in addition to the pressures of building this road and traffic on the ecosystem of this area.

Dung said implementation of hydropower plants resulted in population migration and affected the likelihood of people, who have to resort to hunting, logging and exploiting other resources of forest.

To protect special-use forests and conserve biodiversity in Vietnam, Eames called for the Government to re-examine infrastructure development and intensify enforcement of related regulations and laws.

Le Khac Coi, forest program unit manager of WWF Vietnam, said the economic and social benefits and environmental impact of a project should be weighed carefully before implementing an infrastructure project.

Eames suggested the Government invest more in capacity building for relevant agencies to better protect forests and preserve biodiversity, in addition the funds of international donors.

He noted the funds for biodiversity conservation were now on the decline because donors spared much of their money that they used to reserve for biodiversity for climate change.

Coi of WWF Vietnam put the acreage of natural forests and forest plantation in Vietnam at more than 12 million hectares. However, Coi said these forests were losing their good functions of preventing floods because many trees had been chopped down.

VietNamNet/SGT