To achieve the target, the Central Highlands has planned to strengthen forest management and protection, reforest thousands of hectares, conduct concentrated afforestation on 258,000 ha and grow an additional 50 million trees.

The Central Highlands saw improvements in forest coverage in the 2001-2005 period, according to the MARD. The region now has over 3.7 million hectares of forestry land with a forest coverage of 54.8 percent. The national average is 37 percent.

Over the past five years, forest protection has been much improved in the region. As many as 1,700 hamlets have introduced their own forest protection regulations and 82 percent of the region's communes have forest rangers. The region has also set up around 2,000 teams for fighting forest fire and provided training on forest fire fighting for thousands of local people.

However, much remains to be done to develop forests in the Central Highlands, said the MARD. The region is still facing with deforestation, illegal logging, migration by local people and the cutting of trees for housing and crops like cashew, rubber, pepper and cassava. Another problem is the poor designing of native forests, which has led to the planting of trees inappropriate with afforestation purposes and land structure.