Evaluating the Impacts of Forest Management Policies and Community-Level Institutions in the Buffer Zone of Chitwan National Park, Nepal

Abstract

A Master Plan for Nepal’s Forestry Sector (MPFS), enacted in 1989, and subsequent legislation laid the foundation for modern community-based forest management in Nepal. In 2014, the MPFS reached the end of its 25-yr lifespan, after successfully ushering in significant institutional changes that fundamentally transformed the management of Nepal’s forests, mostly through devolving management and benefits from the national level to local communities. Here, we use the 25-yr anniversary of the MPFS to explore forest cover trends in the buffer zone surrounding Chitwan National Park (CNP). Landsat imagery was used for the years 1989, 2005, and 2013 to compute a normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) to analyze trends in forest cover for 36 buffer zone village development committees (VDCs). The analysis, covering approximately 1,267 km², found that since the MPFS was enacted, there was first a continued decrease in forest cover, followed by a significant recovery. These data offer insight into the success of modern community-based forest management policies and supporting institutions, and provide a model for other efforts to conserve forest resources in Nepal and elsewhere.

KEYWORDS:

• community forestry
• deforestation
• forest policy
• normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)
• Nepal
• remote sensing
• sustainable forest management

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation award EPS-0904155 to the Maine EPSCoR Sustainability Solutions Initiative at the University of Maine, McIntire-Stennis grant number MEO-M-700510-13, and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Additional support was provided by the Maine Agriculture and Forest Experiment Station (Publication #3404) and the Center for Research on Sustainable Forests.