National consulting services for the MAM project

“Southeast Asia has lost half their mangroves over the past 30 years, primarily as a result of clearing for shrimp ponds. This has serious consequences: mangroves protect against tidal waves and storm surges; they are vital fish nursery-grounds, provide timber, honey, and other products; and raise land level by trapping sediment. They also sequester carbon faster than any other forest type. Healthy mangroves thus make important contributions to both climate change adaptation and mitigation and form the basis of coastal ecosystem-based adaptation (EBA). Ngoc Hien covers 70,000 ha mangroves that’s largely intact forests. These mangroves are in problem of conversion. For example, of the 36,266 ha of intact mangroves in 2004, 10,250 ha (26%) were converted to shrimp ponds by 2009. As a result, it was about 5% net loss of mangroves a year (2004-2009), a very high rate of loss in Viet Nam.
The mangroves and markets (MAM) project has tried to support Ng?c Hien district, Ca Mau province, the southernmost province among localities most vulnerable to climate change impacts by providing incentives for mangrove conservation and sustainable aquaculture, and by integrating the results into provincial and national policies. MAM is funded by Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) from now until 2016 and it’s implemented by SNV.
The MAM aims to supporting mangrove restoration models for enhancing carbon stock for avoids deforestation; livelihood improvement on degraded mangroves: conditions for shrimp certification; and support province for creating enable conditions for markets from the ecosystem services. Project focused sites will be Ngoc Hien district for these activities.
One of the most important expected outputs of the MAM is to have successfully demonstrated the economic and environmental benefits of mangrove ecosystems. In which, the MAM will try to minimize net loss of mangrove cover in Ngoc Hien, Ca Mau, the critical areas  for adaptation in Ca Mau where net mangrove loss was very high (5%/year).  Therefore, it’s essential to map current mangrove covers in Ngoc Hien and compare to that of mangrove covers in the past. A detailed mangrove change assessment over four time periods will be conducted in Ngoc Hien, Ca Mau province during 1990 – 2010.
The main objective of this assignment is to analyse forest land-use/ land cover changes and major driving forces behind the changes in Ngoc Hien, Ca Mau province from 1990 – 2010. This analysis shall identify sound and convincing options to address deforestation and degradation, and assess the potential for REDD+ implementation for Ngoc Hien district. The results of this assignment are crucial inputs for contributing to Provincial REDD+ Action Plan as mandated by the Decision 799/QD-TTg of the Prime Minister. It’ll also identify deforestation drivers and hot spots that vulnerable to deforestation, degradation in Ngoc Hien district which is essential for REDD+ intervention and supporting forest management and protection planning and as well as site selecting for the MAM project.

Historical land-use maps, forest data (forest land cover maps and sample plot measurement data from National Forest Inventory Program) for five points in time over the last 20 years (1990, 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2010) will be collated and improved by using remote sensing data acquired more or less at the same year (for forest cover maps), and statistical checking (for field measurement data) of Ngoc Hien, Ca Mau province. (Total area of Ngoc Hien is about 70,000ha).

Details technical requirements please see the attached ToRs
The work needs to be completed in the period from December, 2012 – April, 2013, after date of signing the contract.
Interested consultant should provide:
-      Brief profile of organization showing the relevant experience.
-      CVs of all team members.
-      Detailed proposal including timeline and cost. Both timeline and costs should be broken into activity areas as described in section 3. Costs should be further broken down into staff time and other expenses.
-      An overview of proposed methods and images available and that will be used for analysis (type, date, quality).
Please note, that applications are welcome to include more than one option providing alternate costs / scenarios for using different types of RS imagery and methods
Application Deadline is November 20th, 2012 to Ms. Nguyen Thi Bich Thuy, Project Manager of the  MAM project at SNV sub-Office in HCM city, Vietnam, email: [email protected] and to Ms. Nguyen Thi Thu Quynh, Program Assistant, email: [email protected]”