To properly respond to partners’ needs, we must understand the increasingly complex contexts they face. Our Asian Species Programme Officer Aya Sakamoto recently went to Vietnam – a key focus of our conservation work in Southeast Asia – to visit a range of partners across the country.
Reflecting on the trip, this photo story captures the incredible teams she met supporting vital projects in Vietnam’s wild spaces, and the importance of meeting partners where they are.
Meeting WildAct
WildAct is a a non-profit with the mission to conserve threatened species and ecosystems in Vietnam by inspiring, motivating, and empowering individuals and society.
Hanoi to Thai Binh: Inspiring local youth
The first stop for my time in Vietnam was in Hanoi. There I met WildAct and their young and dynamic team.
Powered by their infectious enthusiasm and energy, we headed to Thai Binh Province for WildAct’s engagement work with school children. The session focused on migratory birds and the value of the Red River Biosphere Reserve – wetlands of global importance for the breeding and stopover of a huge number of bird species. The WildAct team taught students the importance of the ecosystem they call home through an interactive presentation and games, and shared about wider environmental issues – including mist nests, pollution, habitat destruction.
This is part of WildAct’s mission to inspire and change young people’s attitudes towards nature. To make them proud that their home is a key area to host migratory birds – such as the spoonbill sandpiper, black-faced spoonbill, Saunders’s gull, and Swinhoe’s egret – that have travelled thousands of kilometres to visit them.
Meeting Save Vietnam’s Wildlife
Save Vietnam’s Wildlife (SVW), has rescued hundreds of pangolins – the most frequently seized mammal in Asia’s illegal wildlife trade. Used for culinary and medicinal purposes, pangolin meat and scales are fetching increasingly higher prices as their populations decline, so SVW’s work is more important than ever. As well as wildlife rescue and rehabilitation, habitat protection, conservation breeding, and research, SVW’s education outreach and advocacy projects engages communities to preserve species and ecosystems.
Visiting Van Long
Our next stop was Van Long Nature Reserve, where we met up with SVW’s Director Thai Van Nguyen and the Conservation Vietnam team. The scenic nature reserve is an example of successful conservation meeting community-managed tourism. The site not only conserves the largest remaining natural inland wetland in the country’s Northern Plain, but beside these impressive waterways lie its karst limestone mountains – home to the world’s largest population of the Delacour’s langur, a Critically Endangered primate found only in Vietnam. They have had enormous success with the species, with their population almost quadrupling over the last 18 years!
