Resurrection

Prior to the Vietnam War, known domestically as the American War, what is today Can Gio was home to a healthy natural mangrove ecosystem. According to a 2014 report from the International Society for Mangrove Ecosystems (ISME), from 1965 to 1969, the U.S. Air Force sprayed massive amounts of chemical defoliants on the area in an effort to deprive enemy forces of cover.

The result was devastating, with an estimated 57% of the area’s mangroves completely destroyed.

Following the war, parts of the surviving mangrove forests were cut down by local residents for fuelwood and construction material. By the late 1970s, 10,000 hectares (24,710 acres) remained barren, while only 5,600 hectares (13,840 acres) of forest were useable in any way.

In August 1978, the region came under the control of Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, and was renamed Can Gio. The municipal forestry department then undertook a massive reforestation program, planting 20,000 hectares (49,420 acres) of Rhizophora apiculata mangrove trees from specimens taken from the neighboring Mekong Delta.

Up until 1991, the replanted mangroves served as an economic forest for wood production, but Vietnam’s rise as a shrimp export powerhouse led people to clear mangroves for the creation of shrimp farms. In 1991, Can Gio became a coastal protection forest and strict regulations were put into place, and eventually the area “turned into one of the most beautiful and extensive sites of rehabilitated mangroves in the world,” according to the ISME report.

It was Vietnam’s first mangrove biosphere reserve, and the three primary management objects are “biodiversity conservation, environmentally-sound social, cultural and economic development, and mangrove-related training, research and education.”

Global mangrove experts who have studied Can Gio say they are impressed by how well-protected the reserve is.

Cyril Marchand, a professor of earth sciences at the University of New Caledonia, has researched mangroves in French Guiana, New Caledonia and Ho Chi Minh City, where he lived from 2013 to 2017. His focus was the role of mangroves amid climate change, and the presence of trace metals in mangrove forests.

“The mangroves are well-managed,” he said in a recent Skype interview. “There’s one management board, and if someone cuts trees, they use them and they replant — it’s like any use forest in the United States or Europe.”

A use forest is a forest utilized for logging or other economic benefits in a managed way.

“The restoration in Can Gio has been quite successful, because, even though the trees were deforested, the hydrology didn’t change, so they just had to replant and not restore the hydrology, which is a big problem in other mangrove areas,” Marie Arnaud, a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Leeds who spent six months in Can Gio, said in an interview. “They’re doing a good job of trying to protect this forest, too.”

One of these protective measures is to compensate people who live there for managing the forests, a system called payment for forest environmental service (PFES).

“They [the management board] hire people to check if others are deforesting the mangroves, and they give them a bit of money [725,000 dong, or $31, per month] and train them,” Arnaud said. “They’re quite well-integrated into the management of the park, and that’s a real strength. People in Can Gio are very proud of this mangrove forest, and I think that’s really important, that they see that mangroves are really valuable and if we destroy them, we destroy the benefits we get from them.”

Nguyen Thanh Nho, one of the faculty members at the environmental and food engineering department at Nguyen Tat Thanh University in Ho Chi Minh City and an expert on Can Gio, says Vietnam was the first country in Asia to launch a PFES policy on a national scale. However, it remains underutilized in Can Gio due to limited understanding of the role that mangroves play in environmental services.

This is highlighted in a 2012 report that includes a survey of 289 households in Can Gio. The researchers found that more than 80% of respondents understood the role mangroves play in protecting the area from storms, but only 20% were aware that mangroves filter the water that flows through them. Less than 50% of those surveyed recognized the important biodiversity habitats that mangroves contain, or their impact on local climate.

Nho says he believes this needs to change.

“I suggest that a comprehensive study be carried out to explore these services,” he said in an email. “With scientific data, we will explore the willingness to pay for potential environmental services, and get more people to offer such services.”