Driving Forces Of Deforestation And Land Conservation Strategy In Laos

Activities such as those concerned with industrialization,shifting cultivation,mining and land use/cover change often impact the environment in unintended ways.These impacts such as air or water pollution,air pollution,,soil erosion,deforestation occur at the local level but can be felt on a global scale.The understanding of the cause and effect of global change is located in the link between these activities and environmental change.These land use/management activities result from a decision process based on the physical environment and economic,political,technological,and socio-cultural forces.The influence of the socio-cultural(especially non-economic) forces in the decision-making process is the least well understood.The primary of the study is to identify the forest structure and land use change which were traced about 10 years from 1992 to 2002 in the Lao PDR,one of the most important forest regions in South East Asian Countries,based on satellite image interpretation and field survey of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Lao PDR to provide the basic data for local decision-making as well as sustainable land use and management and secondly to overview the government policy in the past concerning to forest and land use management,finally the forest land use policy have been developed based on the result of the study.Lorenz Curve were applied to identify the forest structure change and it shows that the density of the land use structure such as:Current Forest(CF),and Other Wooded Areas(OW) have been getting unbalance,at the same time Potential Forest(PF),Permanent Agriculture (PA) and Other Non-Forest Areas(NF) are tendency to balance,and the service function value of global different ecosystem provided by Costanza et al,for the value of the five forest land use in Lao PDR was worked out,and it shows that the high rate of loss of such services will undoubtedly have serious negative ecological consequences in the long term.Forest Land Use Change and Its Ecological Effect during 10 years(1992 - 2002) were calculated by the map algebra in ArcView GIS 3.2 and after that using the theory of ecosystem service function and the service function value of global different ecosystem provided by Costanza et al,the value of the five forest cover and land use categories in Lao PDR was worked out,and finally,ecological environment effect that the regional land cover change produced in study period was calculated.And based on the estimated size of five land-cover categories and using Costanza et al.'s(1997) ecosystem services values,it could be determined that the total annual ecosystem service values of the current forest in Lao PDR to have declined by 41.1%,between 1992 and 2002.This massive decline in ecosystem services is largely attributable from 22.9%to 0.09%loss of upper mixed deciduous forest,A principal component analysis(PCA) was used to quantitatively study driving forces of landscape changes,the results showed that economic and population factors were the principal driving forces of forest cover and land use changes from 1992 to 2002 in Lao PDR, and that PCA was a suitable method for investigating driving forces of landscape changes.Concerning to resolve the forest land use problem and also to fulfil the goal of the Lao PDR Government,the Lao Government should have clearly policy namely:Stabilization of Shifting Cultivation,Afforestation Programme,Sustainable Forest management System, Environment Initiatives,Protected Areas,Wildlife Resources and Watershed Protection,Wood based Industries Development,Capacity Building and Forestry Research Development.