Mangrove forest management planning in coastal buffer and conservation zones, Vietnam: A multimethodological approach incorporating multiple stakeholders

A multiple of stakeholder goals, regarding natural resource utilisation, are integrated into an overall provincial strategic forest and fisheries utilisation decision support system providing a platform for defining tactical forest planning objectives within a 10-year planning horizon. The case study area is a 5362 ha mangrove forest enterprise, divided into a buffer zone and a full protection zone, which has 46 permanent staff, 575 farming households, 450 near-shore fishing families, and 200 landless families. The analyses are based on a modification of the forest management planning package PEB, which incorporates multi-objective (political, economic, and biological) linear programming using a 10-year planning horizon based on stand data. Numerous stakeholders' goals are included in the forest management plan. A revenue of US$ 2.6 million in the 10-year planning period is achieved of which 46% is generated from forestry in the full protection zone, 33% from non-farm forestry, and 21% from farm forestry in the buffer zone. The full protection zone forest has the potential to generate the highest revenue and, therefore, a discussion is made on allowing limited forestry in the zone. If the firewood value is included, the revenues would increase to US$ 3.4 million. Findings suggest that firewood collection for landless, fishermen, and farmers is sustainable and, therefore, ought to be legalized. The value of on-farm silviculture and firewood collection accounts for 10% of net revenues, which can be compared to the other income generators: tiger shrimp (8%), mud crab (6%), sluice-gate fishery (44%), animal husbandry (5%), and off-farm activities (27%). The ecological linkage between mangroves and fisheries provides a major additional gross margin of between US$ 4 and 12 million from fisheries alone. A discussion on the general applicability, strengths, and shortcomings of the system is made.