Gold discovers Bang Lang Da

Krabi, Bang Lang Da, and our mud was graced by a visit last Sunday from Professor Sanit Aksornkoae and his team of Dr Qwanruedee Chotichanathaewong and K' Natapol Thongplew from the Thailand Environment Institute (TEI), an environmental NGO. TEI has been charged by our funder, the Asia-Pacific Forum for Environment and Development, to oversee our project, and guide us, in a godfatherly way, along the path of mangrove righteousness.

In a recent technical mangrove conference, Dr Don Macintosh, co-ordinator or the IUCN's Mangroves For the Furture programme, questioned whether the "golden age" of mangrove research was coming to an end. Whether or not the end is nigh, Professor Sanit was and is a shiny ingot of that glistering gold. Your blogger has two of his books and was reading his papers before arriving in Thailand in 2005.
Professor Sanit was very supportive of the effort to facilitate natural regeneration, immediately undertood the particular site challenge we faced and encouraged the team to add a greater scientific component to the work. And like the pro that he is, he and his team spent plenty of time with the local community and took a great interest in Bang Don's crab culturing pond. A great lunch was hosted by Bang Don and his family at his home before our visitors flew back to Bangkok. Thank you for your visit.

A short film summarising the progress at Bang Lang Da

A short film of perhaps 6 minutes, showing the life and times of the project at Bang Lang Da: where, what we are trying to achieve, what's the problem, what's our solution, how far have we got and who's come to say hello. Enjoy.

Study Tour from Cambodia

We were thrilled to have our first study tour to see the work, last Sunday. Thai-speaking and gibbon call expert, Dr Robert Mather (pictured left with Bang Don) from the IUCN and WWF staff have been guiding a group of Cambodian villagers around various interesting parts of southern Thailand for a week.
Bang Don (left above) presented the work of his crab group and answered a variety of questions, organisational and technical, posed by the visitors, some of whom did the same thing back home.

For their part, despite it being the last day of what must have been a gruelling tour, they took notes assiduously, and asked very pertinent questions.
Having thanked Bang Don, and the other members of the crab group who supported him, the group moved onto the mangrove site. K' Donnapat and I did our best to explain our objectives, and why a former pond now looked like a golf driving range.

We very much hope that their visit was useful to them. They were delightful people and took an interest in everything.

Please come back to see us again, soon, and feel free to get in contact if we can help further.

Daily Mud - An Update from the Mud Face

So, chums of BLD, time for a mini-update.

All is well down in the mud. Have spent a bit of time this week getting the on-site admin sorted out, as a group from Cambodia will arrive on Sunday for a visit with the IUCN – demonstrating the demonstration.

Two plots next to two hills have been marked off (with green signs). These are for testing direct dibbling of seedlings straight into the mud at the normal level, against seedlings planted on the adjacent hills made from digging spoil, to test comparative vigour and survival. [Unfinished in the picture below, but you get the idea.]

A spare metal rod you can see being used for the corner posts of the plots was smacked into the ground to mark our measuring point and height permanently. Previously I had used the handle of the shovel that survived only four hours of digging. Sadly this disappeared. This rod will not as only the last 2cm of a 2m rod is visible. Bosh.The control plots (orange signs) have been labelled properly now, and are more visible from the edge.
Hills have been labelled (white signs) to make discussion and monitoring of heights etc easier. All the equipment and kit used here will be discussed in a later posting so you can see exactly what we have done and used.
And a small triumph, I think. In discussion with Bang Don’s two nieces, we finally managed to established that the roped-off areas are not for playing in, and hills are not for dancing on. My Thai + mime combo just managed to stretch that far. So hopefully the floor-dibbled propagules will enjoy a slow drowning, rather than being danced into the mud by small feet. And the hill-dibbled propagules will thrive as they are higher and high enough, and not become Britney Spear's microphone.

Ecological Mangrove Rehabilitation - An Introduction

It’s not emergency medical rescue, though it feels a bit like it. Nor is it about atom-spinning electromagnetic radiation. Ecological mangrove rehabilitation is a process developed by Robin Lewis and Mangrove Action Project that, in partnership with the local people, tries to re-establish a functioning mangrove ecosystem. It is often described in six steps.

Summary of the Theory
1. Know the mangroves species around your site and the species you want, their ecology / reproduction / biology.
2. Understand what these species need in terms of water flow, salinity, sun/shade levels flooding, soil types etc
3. Site history. What’s changed on your site? What’s stopping natural regeneration from happening? Was it originally mangrove?
4. Thus, do you have an appropriate site to restore? Can you fix what’s been changed? Has land ownership become an issue? Ie can you fix point three to provide suitable conditions identified in point two.
5. Fix the hydrology to allow natural regeneration to occur.
6. Only plant if the natural regeneration is either too little or arriving and establishing too slowly for your goals. [And even if you have to plant, you still need to do stages 1-5.]


This post should be read in conjunction with the other examples and details on Mangrove Action Project’s EMR web page. The reason for this blog is to describe an actual muddy case history.

So What Has Happened At Band Lang Da?
The theory is all good and lovely. Of course it makes lots of sense. And the science supports it. But EMR happens in a social context. Therefore the process starts with the community, talking and listening. What do they need? It might not be mangrove help. What are their concerns? Shockingly they have other thoughts on their minds than wall-to-wall mangroves. Do they know about mangrove rehabilitation already? (Do not assume that just because a community uses mangroves, they know how to manage a mangrove resource, cf Easter Island.) In our case, if this pond was mangroves again, what species would they value and use? Is there some other problem that is indirectly affecting the mangroves or the conditions and resources around it, like poverty? Happily at BLD no great social problems have emerged. Krabi town is nearby, which offers alternative employment opportunities. And though they use Nypa, their concerns centre more on rubbish collection, refining their crab rearing skills and the quality of the expelled water from the nearby active shrimp ponds.
If at all possible make the community feel as though the whole rehabilitation process is theirs, not yours, including the analysis of the problem and the formulation of the solution. The more participation by the community and the earlier, the better. Development history is littered with failed projects, in all sorts of areas and disciplines, due to ignoring the wishes of the local people and not getting them genuinely involved at the outset. Clearly, this level of (full) participation is an ideal situation and something to strive for. But in reality a local community has its own constraints of time, interest levels and other commitments, as well as the issues the BLD folk have mentioned already. The poorer members in particular might be so busy trying to earn enough to feed their families that they cannot attend meetings to voice an opinion, despite being concerned, interested or indeed directly affected. And a lack of education makes people (again often the poorer members) hesitant to voice an opinion.

One way to involve them in the initial EMR process is to ask the local people a series of questions, rather than lecture to them, so as they arrive at the EMR solution themselves. As they develop answers, these will naturally be tailored to their situation and needs. Another way to involve the community, and particularly if they are not so knowledgeable about their mangroves, is to run an EMR training session at a more technical level, or at a more community/ fisherman level (what MAP calls In The Hands of the Fishers) and environmental education for the children. Again, this will be covered in another posting later on, but is also featured on MAP’s site. Please get in contact if you are thinking about running one of these sessions.

At Bang Lang Da we have spent time discussing the issues and problems with the site, and other topics mentioned above. We have not involved them as much as we might in this case as we ourselves want to do the work, for our own education. But we have spent time getting to know the people and letting them know us. There is a coffee shop in the middle of the community and we stop off there for a drink and chat whenever we go to the site. Needless to say, I struggle with this because of the language barrier, but the people of BLD have been very tolerant, considering how limited my Thai is.
On a more practical level there are a couple of things that we did early on that we hope will save a lot of grief later. The first was to sort out who owns the land. Often this is ill-defined, with questionable tenure, lack of documentary evidence, poor enforcement of the law, conflicting laws, land grabs, the unclear status of community lands and so on. Asking these questions might be stirring up some latent community conflict. But there is no point rehabilitating a site to see it turned into a 7-11 shop a year later. At BLD we had to work a bit to find the owner, but when we did it turned out that he was at school with the boss of Wetlands International (Thailand), - a lucky break. So even though land control appears on point four, do it as part of the initial discussions with the community. At this point a funder would probably want to see a written agreement between the owner and the NGO. We have a Memorandum of Understanding with the owner so we all know what is expected.

You’ll notice that what we have not done yet is start to build a nursery. Do not do it.

The second issue to consider early on, despite the six steps and their order, is to have a rapid but honest assessment of whether the site being proposed is suitable. There is no point going through all the stages and ticking the boxes to get to stage five and find that tidal flush will just never get to your amended site, whatever you do. Or that grazing livestock cannot be controlled and fencing is out of the question. Be realistic. For that reason, early in the process and explaining to the community what we were doing, we surveyed the site topography in detail, as we feared the site was too low. Another blog post will cover what we did and how, later on.
In the next few weeks more blogs will be posted about how we are proceeding with the EMR process in BLD. Please get in contact if you have any questions you think we might be able to help with. Chok dee, na.