The management and sharing of data on forests in Vietnam was the main topic of a workshop co-organised in HCM City on March 8 by the General Department of Forestry under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Finnish Embassy.

Damaged part of the Dai Ninh protection forest in Lam Dong

The workshop formed part of the second phase of the Forest Management Information Systems Project (FORMIS) funded by the Finnish Government.

Jorma Jyrkila, Forest Data Service Manager of the Finnish Forest Centre, said Finland’s data on forest exploitation, growth and protection are updated regularly. The country mainly uses remote sensing technology to conduct forest surveys, helping it cut costs by 60-70 percent.

Nguyen Ba Ngai, Deputy General Director of the General Department of Forestry, said more than 800,000 forest owners in 40 provinces and cities have been updated into Vietnam’s forestry resources database.

With the assistance from Finland, the department is updating information about 8.5 million forest lots in all 63 provinces and cities, thus helping enterprises to have enough information to make their investment decisions.

Nguyen Ton Quyen, Vice President and General Secretary of the Vietnam Timber and Forestry Products Association, said the information and data of the FORMIS project are very useful to wood processing enterprises.

The system can help enterprises follow changes of forests and forest land, determine locations, road conditions, and distance to create detail plans for buying material wood as well as contact local forest management agencies for necessary information.

This year, the department will implement urgent solutions to facilitate the use of information and data on forest management by integrating forestry data into the FORMIS system and build mechanisms for exchange information with the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment and the General Statistics Office.

The second phase of the FORMIS project has been implemented in five years, beginning in May, 2013, with the aim of building a comprehensively integrated management system to serve the management of forestry resources and reduce poverty.

VNA