DEVELOPMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL INDICATORS WITH RELEVANT STAKEHOLDERS’ INVOLVEMENT FOR SUSTAINABLE WATERSHED MANAGEMENT: A CASE STUDY OF THE LAM NAM YANG PART 1 WATERSHED IN NORTHEASTERN THAILAND

Abstract

Stakeholders’ involvement have been said to be critical factor to success or failure of the watershed management, as a result sustainable and integrated watershed management to engage all stakeholders is therefore needed. One approach is through the application of the indicator-based to develop a watershed sustainability and watershed health indicators to provide conditions of watershed. This study aims to identify the state of the Lam Nam Yang Part1 watershed management, and to develop a set of environmental indicators for sustainable watershed management based on stakeholders’ involvement process through community survey, key informant interview, experts and relevant stakeholders’ judgments. The Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework was applied to identify key environmental issues and used to frame the environmental indicators of the Lam Nam Yang Part1 watershed. It was found that key environmental issues included water shortage for agriculture, water shortage for consumption, loss of soil fertility, forest destruction, decline of plant and animal species, soil erosion and loss of topsoil causing soil degradation, respectively. A set of environmental indicators selected to monitor the sustainable of the watershed totaled 101 indicators including 13 Drivers indicators, 24 Pressure indicators, 24 State indicators, 21 Impact, and 19 Response indicators. The study has experienced that there are some limitations and difficulties in the construction of environmental indicators in development process, and there should be further studied in order to develop, extend, and adapt the environmental indicators to specific contextual area for achieving sustainable watershed management. However, it is also clear that this is a worthwhile exercise and that the benefit of developing a set of environmental indicators creates the knowledge sharing among stakeholders and local experts in the watershed level.