" Assessment of an environmental rewarding scheme and environmental services (UCP & NFPP)

" Coverage and monitoring of the UCP & NFPP efforts

" Maps of biodiversity "hot spot"

" Assessment of vulnerability and soil erosion hazard

" Infrastructure and markets

" Population and migration

In addition to the above, information generated by the SIS will be utilized for policy dialog and policy briefs. The research project is expected to produce a conceptual framework on linkage between policy-population and LUCC for that will be available to the LUCC and HDGC community that will facilitate comparative research across sites anywhere on the globe. It will also seek to advance theoretical understanding of the actor-decision-making processes for LUCC through testing hypotheses that are both scale-specific and that cut across different scales.

Much of our field research is done in collaboration with partner institutions and organizations such as local government, local communities, research institutes and NGOs in the various countries in MMSEA region. One of project components will focus on capacity building through a number of mechanisms: on-site training, joint field survey, GIS lab training and writing workshops.

Contributions to the LUCC Science Plan

The work of PODEC fits in with both Focus 1 and Focus 2, but particularly with Focus 1. It will definitely contribute to better understanding "tropical deforestation" discourse in the international society based on different research scales of forest ecosystems in MMSEA. It will sharpen the policy as dominating and proximate driver as cause of land use and land cover changes which is often associated with socio-economic and biophysical factors.

The work links closely to the LUCC Science Plan in that it examines both the proximate and the underlying driving forces of land use change such as property rights, population and migration, production and consumption patterns, micro and macroeconomic policies, and household economy, and political ecology.

Project associations and affiliations

Project team

Dr. Horst Weyerhaeuser, Dr. Chun K. Lai, & Dr. David Thomas, The International Centre for Research in Agroforestry