Forestry and deforestration in the Greater Central Indochinese Highlands - A view from Cambodia and Laos - Asst. Prof. Dr. Michael Dwyer - University of Hamburg
In recent decades, the Cambodia and Lao portions of the Central Indochinese Highlands have emerged as deforestation hotspots, as state forest enterprises and then transnational plantation companies have targeted the upland frontier. Focusing on the history and drivers of forest conversion in this area, this talk will discuss two transnational approaches to combat ongoing forest loss: community-driven land rights reclamation, using an example from northeastern Cambodia; and carbon forestry, or REDD, using an example from southern Laos. The talk will highlight the ongoing challenges of both approaches, despite some initial successes.
Michael Dwyer is Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography of Indiana University with a Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from the University of California, Berkeley. His work draws on political ecology, political geography, and development studies to investigate the uneven geographies of development in Southeast Asia. His research and teaching interests include the legacies of the Cold War conflict in shaping contemporary processes of state-managed land grabbing, the spatial targeting of land-governance interventions like land titling and climate change-focused forest conservation, and the political-economic and geopolitic drivers of new and environmentally harmful energy infrastructure in the Mekong region. Michael Dwyer is currently working on his forthcoming publications Upland Geopolitics: Postwar Laos and the Global Land Rush and Turning Land into Capital: Development and Dispossession in the Mekong Region.
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“Forestry and Plantations in Southeast Asia (SEA)” is the topic of a two-semester series of classes. During the summer semester of 2021, the class has already covered insular SEA, especially Indonesia and the Philippines. In the fall-winter semester of 2021/22, the focus will be on continental SEA.
Especially the Central Indochinese Highlands will be in the center of attention, and on the side of the three countries Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. In recent decades, it is well known that so much natural forest area has been lost, so many hectares of plantations have been developed, starting in Vietnam, then spreading across the borders to Lower Laos and Northeastern Cambodia. The Vietnamese logging and plantation company Hoàng Anh Gia Lai is one prominent example. Similar processes occur in Northern Indochina as well, for instance along the Laos-China border. During the seminar and lecture series, we would like to raise some of the following questions, for example:
How did deforestation happen, and how did the plantation industry grow - causes, processes, and consequences.
How would forestry or ecology sciences, geography or sociology assess this matter?
What could and should be to done to preserve the natural tropical rain forest?
Are there are positive, effective methods to avoid the complete loss of natural tropical forests in the region of SEA, or is it doomed to disappear?
The seminar includes a number of guest lectures from experts of the field who will give insights into the topic from different perspectives.
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