Vinh Tu Commune is situated in the coastal sand area of Vinh Linh district, Quang Tri province, at 30 km to the North from Dong Ha City and adjacent to National Highway 1. The distance from the commune center to the sea is 3 kilometres. The commune population is 3265 within 943 households, 7.08% of which belong to the poor category. Vinh Tu has a total natural area of 3.539 hectares with 450 hectares of sand forests, scattering 10 villages. Initial research shows that Vinh Tu?s sand forests are home to rich biodiversity resources which are typical of Vietnam?s coastal sand ecosystem
Currently, the government puts the sand forests under the management of communal administration, and this management and protection of sand forests in Vinh Tu are inefficient due to various factors. There is a lack of not only participation and ownership of local community and people but also sufficient attention to management and protection efforts because of the commune?s limited human and financial resources. There has been no research thorough enough to help evaluate scientific, economic, social and environmental values of sand forests as well as projects/priority activities with an aim to conserve, restore and effectively use sand forests. The community knowledge about management and protection of sand forests is still limited. The economic value (from wood) of the flora and fauna on sand is low because there are no large trees, which leads to the underestimation of the important of the sand forest?s protection. Moreover, during wartime (1960-1973) the local people and soldiers cut trees in sand forests to evade bombs. After the war, they cut trees for house reconstruction and other uses, thereby natural resources suffer from a serious decline. In addition, the local flora and fauna have to recover slowly in an adverse climate. Besides, the local people collect tree leaves for ?boi?, causing the loss of in the sand layer below the plants. All of these lead to sand erosion and poor ability to keep water.
Therefore, this project aims at contributing to the conservation and protection of the sand forest?s flora and fauna on the inactive sand area of Vinh Tu commune. The specific objectives include (i) to enhance the ownership and technical ability for the community in Dong Truong and Tu Chinh hamlets in managing, protecting and exploiting the sand forests, (ii) to build a model that demonstrates technical solutions to conserving and developing sand forests, (iii) to decrease the pressure to exploit the resources from the sand forests, increase the coverage, improve soil?s quality, contribute to income increase, improve living?s standards of local people in Dong Truong, Tu Chinh hamlets and (iv) evaluate the result and share the experience of building a community model to manage, protect and exploit sand forests.
The project?s approach includes (i) raising awareness of sand forests? scientific, environmental, economic and social values, (ii) grant the people the rights of managing, protecting and using the sand forests, (iii) experimenting technologies to grow local plants of sand forests to enhance coverage and continuous development between patches sand forests, (iv) enhancing the efficiency of local livelihoods to reduce the pressure to exploit sand forest resources, (v) building capacity for management, protection and exploitation of sand forests through technology transfer to the community and (vi) attracting the attention of authorities, concerned parties and local community in managing, protecting and using sand forests.