Monitoring and optimizing the design quality of mangrove restoration towards a sustainable coastal ecosystem management in Thailand and Mekong delta of Vietnam – RESCuE

The proposed project is a three-year collaboration between scientists of Europe, ASEAN and policy makerfrom government institutes. Sustainable coastal ecosystem management and conservation via internationaland domestic research network are the main goal of this project. Mangrove forests and forest managementface a variety of challenges due to ecological and socio-economic developments, such as climate changeand an increasing demand for wood from local population and the bioenergy sector.Albeit these challenges affect mangrove ecosystem management over all ASEAN countries, no commonforest policy exists on regional level to date. Also, the current knowledge of mangrove forests in this region islimited and highly uncertain for sustainable management and future rehabilitation such as speciescomposition, carbon stock, height, density, canopy closure and afforestation practices. Effective ecologicalmapping and monitoring is needed for local and national decision-and-policy-makers to support mangroveforest protection and restoration efforts.The proposed project under SEA-EU-NET designed for long term coastal ecosystem management, and toexploit the synergies between forest-based adaptation and restoration strategies. The project would link topolicy maker, current vulnerability assessment, restoration potential and planning, research support to localinitiatives, and knowledge dissemination to contribute to ASEAN research communities. The first part ofproject provides an overview of current state of mangrove forest as well as relevant threats and challengesregarding ASEAN mangrove ecosystem and forest protection. The second part aims to develop modelingand forecasting the effect of restoration measures and the third part focus on the ecosystem service modeldevelopment and recommendation. Scenarios for an effective and feasible approach towards better forestprotection, restoration on regional scale and recommendations for the implementation will be provided.The project activities will focus on Thailand and Mekong delta in Vietnam. Impact would be achieved throughinfluencing the technical scientific capacity of forest restoration, monitoring and creating international networkto improve local management practices