 So I will proceed with the first of the presentations. My name's Aaron Russell. So I'm presenting on forest commons, impact of forest commons, and agroforestry concessions on household resilience in southern Laos. This is a research that has been funded by two multi-donor trust funds within the World Bank, PRO4, and the Trust Fund for Environmental and Social Sustainability. I think I've got them all. And in collaboration with national partners in Laos, the Department of Forestry and the Forest Research Institute Center, sorry. As a brief introduction to Laos, it is a landlocked country in Southeast Asia. The highlighted block there, that is the district where we're actually focusing our research on. And actually, that should be Savannah Ket, the one right above it. Excuse me, we moved. We changed provinces since we did this slide. Roughly 41% of the country is claimed to be under forest cover, so it's relatively high. There is a high importance of NTFPs in local culinary traditions. And both urban and rural stakeholders have a remarkably high consumption of non-timber forest products in their daily diets. The national development narrative is dominated, however, on attracting foreign direct investment, particularly through land use intensification. Key forestry policies or key policy context that this research relates to. There's a national economic development plan, which has a number of very ambitious goals for economic development, including maintaining an 8% economic growth, reducing poverty significantly, emerging from the least developed countries category by 2020, and much of this is stipulated on an expansion of foreign direct investment, including a development of plantations. Then you have the forestry strategy, which aims to restore forest in quotes, because forest is to include anything that is tree-like. So a restore forest cover to 70% by 2020. Even if you include plantations as forests, it is clear that it may be difficult to achieve both of these objectives as much of the land use intensification is aimed at agricultural concessions rather than tree production. There is also an increasing kind of movement pressure, largely stimulated by donor agencies for participatory forest management. This is relatively recent in its development in Laos since the mid-'90s. It's really not well-established yet, and it still faces many challenges, but there's a very ambitious goal to extend that throughout the country, particularly in production forest areas. It should be mentioned, however, that the context of this research, which focuses on dry dipterocarp forests, is largely, is not covered by a lot of these policies, because most of them lay outside of conservation and production forest areas because they've traditionally not been viewed as a very valuable resource, and this is partially why we are doing this research. To give you a little bit of a context on the land grab context of Laos, this is based on some recent research by colleagues at the Center for Development and Environment at the University of Berne. A large amount of land has been converted in the last decade, roughly equal to 5% of the nation's land surface. Most of that is aimed at foreign direct investment rather than national investment, and particularly investors from Vietnam, China, and Thailand. Through the 90s, this was primarily aimed at the North, and much of that was also timber logging concessions and rubber plantation development. Increasingly now, and this is where our case study takes place, we're looking at central and southern Laos, and particularly where this is the economic corridor, that this is Laos in pink. There's major economic corridor with new highways, several major bridges connecting Bangkok, southern central Laos, to major markets in Vietnam, and so this is accelerating demand for land from both Vietnamese and Thai investors in central and southern Laos. This is the province where we are working, of Savannah Ket. That highway cuts across roughly this line of latitude between the two stars, cuts right across the North. The three case studies that we were asked to focus on by the policymakers was to work to focus on the three primary contrasts that they are facing. The two main land conversions in Savannah Ket are for eucalyptus and sugar cane plantations, and then there is a village that is seen as a dry dipterocarp village. You'll notice all of them lay outside of the green zones. Green zones are either the dark green or protected areas, the light green are production forest areas which have a certain conservation status. Most dry dipterocarp forests lie outside of those because both the conservationists and two foresters, they've generally been regarded with limited value, and this is a major reason for why the forest department asked for this research to be done because they were concerned that lacking any protective status, these areas would be prone to conversion. And introduction to dry dipterocarp forests, as I wasn't familiar with them before I started this project myself, it's not terribly clear, but this is a mature forest, the top two corners, these are mature forests. They are extremely slow growing species, average maturity or average harvestable age at 110 years when they reach roughly a DBH of 25 centimeters. So these are on very shallow soils that are prone to flooding and drought and have regular fire regimes. Typically, they frequently look quite scraggly and stunted in appearance, and therefore, for foresters and many policy makers, they don't appear to be of very significant value. The bottom two contexts are what is increasingly being seen, conversion to, well, you can't see it very well, conversion to eucalyptus plantation and sugarcane plantations. Some key forest products that people have known for a while to be of importance that come from dry dipterocarp forests are mushrooms, frogs, beetles, a lot of insect larvae of many kinds. Kisi is a damar resin used in lacquer ware and various types of pharmaceuticals and a lot of vegetables and mushrooms and flowers that are actively consumed locally as well as exported to Thailand and Vietnam. However, these frequently remain invisible. They're collected by invisible actors, frequently by women, maybe even children. They may not be traded in capturable markets contexts where they can be measured, much of it is consumed in the household. And therefore, the policy makers were concerned that as these are invisible values, these forests are particularly in danger of being converted. So the research, overarching research question of this project was to look at how do forests enhance resilience of the agricultural sector to climate change? Had several subcomponents, how does climate change project it to impact livelihood resilience? How do dry dipterocarp forests contribute to the resilience of communities? And what are the impacts of dry dipterocarp forest conversion to sugarcane eucalyptus on resilience? This can be somewhat demonstrated in a matrix where we looked at the status in three communities, one in the dry dipterocarp one, another one with sugarcane eucalyptus under different climate change scenarios. In this presentation, we're not gonna focus on the climate change and land use scenarios per se. We'll focus mainly on the status as we found them here. Methodologically, this is somewhat preliminary research aimed at identifying the key questions that need to be understood by policy makers that need to be invested in. So extensive participatory rapid appraisal using the pro for poverty and forest toolkit were used with stakeholder groups from different wealth groups, wealth categories and gender groups. From within them, a selection of households were selected to get more detailed socioeconomic demographic, a rice consumption and nutritional consumption data. And these were validated in local district province stakeholder workshops. First of all, a major difference between the three communities. The PSFM is the program for sustainable forest management. Then you have eucalyptus and sugarcane. The amount of communal forest land is significantly larger in the PSFM community in comparison with where it might not go. With eucalyptus, which does still have some real forest land, so that excludes the plantation and sugarcane has very little. There are other differences that we won't go into detail here, but I'll point out PSFM, they have a much greater amount of patty available to them than do the others, but something to be explored further is that their yields are much lower than the others. So there's greater intensification of production in the others. In contrast, in the concession communities, this is the amount of hectares of land on a per household basis that they have lost to the concession. There are clear income disparities. If you look at purely cash income, there are clear disparities. The Seuford, this is another acronym for the same group here. Their average income is well below the other communities, and within each of the wealth groupings, they're clearly below the other communities. And this would fit very well into a narrative of the poverty environmental crisis. However, questioning that myth, when we calculated consumption, collection and sale of, or not sale, consumption of rice and non-timber forest products, cash plus non-cash income brings the total income values roughly to very similar levels. Although the reliance by the dry-dipter-carb village is clearly much more on non-cash income. It's almost an inverse relationship compared with the concession villages. So therefore one might say, well, you know, then what's the big deal? There's really not much of an issue. They're roughly the same income, so we shouldn't be too worried about the impacts. Question is though, what are the costs and benefits and for whom within the community? This research is not, the sampling in terms of households is very limited, so we can't make very strong statements about a lot of these wealth impacts. However, there are a couple of key patterns that we saw that we thought were interesting and particularly interesting to pursue in future research. One major narrative that we found in the communities is that they were concerned about losing diversity of what they were consuming. And in most of these communities, in the concession communities, they indicate that they don't actually generally replace lost vegetables, wild vegetables with the purchased vegetables, for example. Also, their protein consumption is vastly reduced. This would seem to be when we collected data on their actual consumption, this is of NTFPs, interestingly, and we can't really explain it, the poor are not the largest consumers of NTFPs, actually the middle wealth classes that appear to be consuming more, vastly more NTFPs than anyone else. And in the sugarcane village, which has almost no forest left, there's the differences between the different wealth groups is not very, is not as significant. But this is annual consumption, and so this belies the seasonality effects. There are clear seasons where stakeholders have a greater or lesser reliance on NTFPs. Similarly, we looked at rice consumption. The national norm that the government expects people to consume is 350 kilograms per capita per year. And overall, they're quite close to that, even in all the communities, except for these wealthy groups that appear to consume a vast amount more of rice. But again, while they appear to be close to the annual norm, the seasonal shortages are clearly discussed by communities, and so they therefore do not appear in this data. One of the more surprising, unexpected kind of outcomes of this research was the importance of livestock assets. And we would posit this as a potential measure in terms of resilience to shocks. This is not actually a production system, it's mainly a savings system, but the value of these livestock in comparison to their annual cash income is quite significant in the dry-dip to car forest village. The average, again, from the limited household sample that we have, the average value equivalent of livestock in terms of their cash equivalent is 3.6 years of annual income. In the eucalyptus village, this goes an average down to one, similarly down the sugarcane village. But these are recent developments, though, and it is clear that the poor and all these communities, and these latter-age communities are being forced to sell off more of their livestock. In the sugarcane village, they already have. And so in both of these communities, the carrying capacity is well exceeded by the number of livestock that they have, and they really rely on seeking pasture in neighboring villages in order to maintain their livestock. So one other point that was raised, by having the forest, they have seasonal access to income. It helps to meet their seasonal and short-term needs, and therefore the communities stay together. This was somewhat borne out in terms of labor contribution. There is a greater alliance in the eucalyptus and sugarcane villages on both labor income as well as remittance income, although the remittance was not as significant as we had somewhat expected. And dry-dipped or carved forest, it was less than the others. So then we looked at concession outcomes. The availability of data from the actual concessions where we were working was an issue. We couldn't get access to the actual concession data that was quite sensitive. So we had to look for other examples. We found small-scale sugarcane farmers in the area, as well as another concession, not the one that we were looking at, and a baseline of the TAI system that appears to be quite functional. The three law case studies, the two small-scale and the larger-scale one, it appears to be somewhat a losing investment. And it's not clear exactly what the primary source of the issue, what the primary source is, whether it's a question of the technology and knowledge and skills, whether it's particular susceptibility to white leaf disease, or whether, I mean, but the clear is, the break-even point is that you need a much higher yield per hectare to make this work out. And in the law context, the yield is very low. So they're not exactly clear what the major issue, the explanatory variable is. Eucalyptus, we could find even less data. However, in terms of contributions to households, there's almost no labor demand for eucalyptus plantations. Similarly, in the sugar cane plantations. I should have mentioned that labor statistic, none of that money came from the concessions, the previous one, almost all of the money came from other labor activities. And so for households, the loss of their lands to concessions is not translating into rural development objectives. So lessons learned in terms of the economics of the large-scale concessions, it would appear that the dry-dipto-carb forest soils might make the conversion particularly for sugar cane and eucalyptus may be not so for cassava, but make those somewhat uncertain investments. Major issue in Laos is poor documentation and accessibility of data, and that contributes to the creation of conflicts between concessions and local communities. This is a major issue in doing any kind of assessment in Laos. And there's very limited employment offered by them. In addition, in terms of these direct impacts, this is having a spillover effect that the communities that are in proximity of concessions are increasingly prioritizing any remaining communal forest land out of fear that because they have no confidence that their forests will not be granted by any one of many institutions that can grant concessions in Laos. Increasingly, the commons are being lost because people are privatizing and fencing it, in some cases even just logging it just to be able to, and planting some eucalyptus, not for the economic benefits, but just to be able to stake the claim. So forest loss through concessions is resulting in tragedy of the remaining commons. It would appear. So tentative conclusions on household resilience. Forest communities, they clearly rely most on non-cash income, whereas concession communities rely more on cash income. But overall, the incomes are relatively close. But this would kind of counterveil the poverty environment and excess theories. And all of these are tentative. There are question marks at every one of them, so I would value any feedback that you have in terms of better explanations. All the communities and wealth classes seem to rely significantly on forests for both non-cash and cash income, and it seems to confirm expectations from other publications. Rice consumption appears adequate everywhere, with particular excesses in the concession villages. This might be a question of sampling or how the framing of the questions was done, but we can't truly explain it. But it should be noted, there are very different yield levels in these communities. So there's significant area for improvement in their yields. Highest and surprisingly, the highest NTFP consumption is among the middle wealth class. And that's really, is this a question of sampling? Is this a question of the lower ability of the poor households to estimate their quantification? This was a single survey estimating annual consumption, so it's really not clear what that meant. Concession communities, they report shortages in seasonal availability of forest products yet. And they claim that they see a negative impact on dietary diversity and on their weekly, monthly household cash income needs, but they have overall similar levels of produce consumption. There may be one additional explanatory variable, maybe the fact that in these communities, people are just not very happy. Either they really have a strongly negative relationship with this Eucalyptus concession company where there's a lot of conflicts. In the case of the Shurikane concession where they've lost more forest, they were actually consulted with, but they had a choice to reduce the concession scale. But overall, their perceptions of the livelihoods may just be very negative. So that may have an impact on their perception of well-being. The poor in the concession communities rely most on migrant and day labor income. This doesn't appear to be surprising. It's surprising that it's not more. And this was more significant than expected, but I'm not exactly sure how to model this as it's not a production system. The livestock are not really a production system. It's really, but it represents a significant buffer in terms of overcoming significant shocks to the system. So forests provide a significant shocks through provision of livestock fodder. Major constraint is that communities are ignorant of any rights or understanding of the legal mechanisms for protecting their land allocations. Their maps are drawn by various projects and then they disappear. No one has a copy of them. There are major issues that result in conflict and make it impossible for communities to really contest claims by concession holders. There's extremely poor coordination between agencies. District agencies allowed to make an allocation of up to 100 hectares, province up to 1,000 hectares, the national government up to 10,000, but there's no coordination among them and there's no central registry and there's no monitoring of how those are implemented in the field. So these are major issues constraining planners' abilities to make rational decisions. So a couple of key priority questions for policy makers to answer in order to know how to deal with this particularly the dry diptoic context because the opportunities for other cash cropping are more limited and how much potty land should be allocated per household or per capita to ensure future food self-sufficiency? How much dry diptoic harvest should be preserved per household? If you wanted to maintain a buffer for resilience. Then in relating more to concessions, what criteria should be applied to ensure that companies demonstrate the viability of their concessions? It's not a secret that many concessions are granted in Laos have nothing to do with the viability of that concession. There are other objectives where the company may be getting other deals that have nothing to do with this concession. But I'm not saying that this is the case in these two companies, but it is very clear that there's limited cost benefit analysis or viability analysis by these concessions of these concessions themselves. Their overall strategy may be sound, but it's not necessarily achieving the impact here. What kind of compensation should the concessions provide to replace the benefits and what kind of institutional monitoring and arbitration adjudication mechanisms are needed to safeguard the interests of communities? Lacking any of the above, how does the government plan to address demand for employment if rural livelihoods are undermined? So those were some of the key questions that we felt needed to be addressed. I welcome any questions or any comments.