Impacts of Payment for Forest Ecosystem Services on Local livelihoods in A Luoi District, Thua Thien Hue Province, Viet Nam

This paper analyses the impacts of the national Payment for Forest Environmental Services (PFES) policy in A Luoi district, Thua Thien Hue province, Viet Nam. There are mixed impacts of PFES in A Luoi district. While some surveyed households have experienced increases in income since PFES, for many other incomes have fallen. Our findings show PFES impacts on local communities and individuals are limited because most forest areas are managed by state agencies, leaving only 17.9% of PFES payments being channeled to these groups, while the rest goes to state government agencies and commune people’s committees. This disparity in PFES payments has further widened the income gap between state agencies and local households.  PFES payments currently contribute little to household incomes, averaging only 2.64% of total earnings. PFES has little impact and additionality in advancing land tenure security and reducing natural forest product exploitation for generating income as impacts are similar to those found in non-PFES villages. PFES poverty reduction impacts vary from village to village, but in general, percentages of poor households receiving PFES payments range from 1% to 59%

An Improvement Method for Semantic Mapping Database to Ontology

Enormous amount of available data in relational database (RDB) format creates a demand for automatic transforming them into OWL ontology to reuse in the Semantic Web. Many approaches have been proposed, however, most of them simply generate output ontology as the same flat structure with the original database and result in redundancy of ontology data.  As an attempt to resolve the redundant problem, we propose a novel approach to generate OWL ontology from relational database while focusing on the similarity measure of duplicate attributes in relational tables. Experimental results show that the proposed method reliably predicts semantic similarity of duplicate columns and produces a better-quality OWL ontology

FIELD TEST ON CLEANING OF OIL POLLUTION ON NHATRANG BEACH OF VIETNAM

Joint Research on Environmental Science and Technology for the Eart

REDD+ politics in the media : A case study from Vietnam

Special Issue: Shifting global development discourses - Implications for forests and livelihoods ( Vol. 19, Supplement 1, December 2017)Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD+) is an international effort to create financial value for the carbon stored in forests, offering incentives for developing countries to reduce emissions from land uses. Vietnam is engaged in the international REDD+ debate and is a partner to numerous multi- and bilateral agreements. Different actors have diverse interests in the REDD+ agenda, and in Vietnam, even though an authoritarian state, different views exist on what REDD+ should achieve. Through the analysis of media articles this study intends to understand how public debates on REDD+ are framed in the Vietnamese policy domain and how actors use the media to promote their interests. Reporting about a diversity of actors and interests, in particular related to expressions of equity concerns in media frames could reflect a growing inclusive political space. Our findings show that while state actors dominate REDD+ media frames, some limited space is present for non-state actors’ interests, but equity issue discussed still reflect predominantly state mediated concerns. However, caution is still required due to the limitations these findings come with.Peer reviewe

Returns to Education and the Demand for Labour in Vietnam. ESRI WP506. July 2015

Using data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey, this paper examines the returns to education in Vietnam in 2002 and 2010, and how these returns changed over time. Given the economic growth that took place during this time period, the relative demand for labour is also assessed in order to identify if skill-biased technical change played a role in explaining the returns to education in Vietnam at a time of exceptional economic growth. The male and female education returns displayed a linear pattern in both 2002 and 2010, with earnings rising with increased levels of education. Relative to males with no qualifications, the returns to those with a vocational training qualification or below fell between 2002 and 2010, while the economic returns to a college education and above increased. Similar results were observed for females. In relation to relative labour demand, the results indicated that the demand for all levels of education (apart from males with a high school qualification) relative to those with no qualifications grew between 2002 and 2010. However, there was particularly strong growth in the demand for those with a vocational training qualification and above, especially an advanced degree qualification. Findings from the paper show that high levels of economic growth in Vietnam between 2002 and 2010 have facilitated increasing returns to education and demand for high skilled labour. In addition, there appears to be shortages for some types of skilled labour

Policy learning in REDD plus Donor Countries : Norway, Germany and the UK

Peer reviewe

The distribution of payment for forest environmental services (PFES) in Vietnam: Research evidence to inform payment guidelines

Peer reviewe

Structural Diversity of Alkaline Earth Centered Gold(I) Metallacoronates

One‐pot reactions of the catechol‐scaffolding aroylbis(N,N‐diethylthiourea) H2Lcat with mixtures of alkaline earth nitrates M(NO3)2 (M2+ = Ca2+, Sr2+ or Ba2+) and (NEt4)[AuCl4] or [Au(tht)Cl] (tht = tetrahydrothiophene) in methanol in the presence of Et3N as supporting base give rise to neutral trinuclear gold(I) {2}‐metallacoronates with the composition of {M ⊂ [Au2(Lcat)2]} (1). Similar reactions with the pyridine‐centered aroylbis(N,N‐diethylthiourea) H2Lpy, however, produce complexes with the same metal‐to‐ligand ratio but with higher nuclearity {2M ⊂ [Au4(Lpy)4]} (2). In both 1 and 2, Au(I) ions are exclusively S‐bonded with the organic ligands and adopt a virtually linear coordination fashion. Such metal‐ligand binding is responsible for the formation of metallacoronands, which accommodate alkaline earth metal ions in their molecular voids, thereby resulting in host–guest coordination assemblies. The level of metal‐ligand aggregation in the resulting assemblies is dependent on the denticity, size and flexibility of the centered building block of the aroylbis(N,N‐diethylthiourea) ligands