Research Project

"Mechanism of Land Use Changes in Mainland Southeast Asia: Field Work-based Remote Sensing Analyses"
Project Leader: KONO, Yasuyuki

• Outline

• Field Research List
• Seminars/Symposia
• Publications

Outline

Environmental conservation and poverty mitigation are, in theory, supposed to be two wheels of rural development. Environmental conservation programs enrich natural resources such as land, water and forest which provide basis of the livelihood system of rural population. Poverty mitigation programs upgrade rural economy to prevent misuse of natural resources and to promote their sustainable management.

What is actually going on, however, at rural areas of Mainland Southeast Asia is something different from what the theory teaches us. Environmental conservation and poverty mitigation are confronting, particularly on land use. Land is the common resources both for environmental conservation and poverty mitigation. We need land for bio-diversity conservation and water harvesting, and also for subsistence farming and cash income generation activities. Scarcity of land resources makes synthesizing environmental conservation and poverty mitigation difficult.

The present project aims at reviewing the long-term changing process of land use, reconsidering the mechanism behind the scarcity of land resources and to proposing the feasible synthesis of environmental conservation and poverty mitigation.

We focus on the village-level land use changes at selected sites in Vietnam, Laos and Yunnan province, China, in order to identify changes in land use precisely and to relate them to socio-economic events. Major materials to identify land use changes are aero photos, high-resolution satellite images, and gaiho-zu, maps published by the Japanese army mainly in the 1940s and collected by CSEAS. These images are interpreted based on the information collected through field survey.

List of Seminars and Symposia

1. Date:July 19 (Sat.), 2008, 13:00-18:30／July 20 (Sun.), 2008, 9:00-15:00
2. Topic : Seminar on Cultivating Nature, Adopting to Nature: Dynamics of Lao Livelihood
3. Co-organizer: Seminar on Mountainous Area in Mainland Southeast Asia (MTSEA)
4. Place : Room 207 on the 2nd floor of CSEAS East Building

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