AsiaLIFE

Breathtaking biodiversity and intact ecosystems make Cambodia a top destination for conservationists. Rare and endangered animals compete for attention, while the chance of discovering a new species is real. Yet Cambodia is developing, and with development often comes destruction of wildlife and their habitats. Does the Kingdom stand a chance of preserving its natural heritage? Words by Nora Lindstrom

It was March this year when the news broke: a new species of the common gecko had been discovered in Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains. Olive-coloured with small black blotches containing a central black dot, the small lizard immediately had wildlife enthusiasts tweeting, facebooking, and blogging about the new arrival.

As head of NGO Fauna & Flora International’s (FFI) Cardamom Mountains research group, Neang Thy was part of the survey team that first discovered the gecko back in 2007. Once definite results were out almost three years later, the gecko was named after Thy. Cnemaspis neangthyi is now the latest member of a small family of geckos found only in Cambodia’s Cardamoms.  “I am very happy and proud to have a species named after me,” says Thy.

2010 has been designed the Year of Biodiversity, and if you’re into wildlife, Cambodia is the place to be.

“There are certain areas you go to and every time you find a species new to science,” says Matt Maltby, Project Officer at Fauna & Flora International. He describes how expeditions into protected areas are still merely “scratching the surface” when it comes to discovering new species and plants.

"Cambodia retains exceptional biological integrity compared to other mainland Southeast Asian countries,” says Louise Durkin, country coordinator of Frontier-Cambodia, a conservation and development non-profit. Wars, underdevelopment, as well as high and diverse forest coverage have all contributed to making the country one of the last havens of the Indo-Burmese biodiversity hotspot, which previously ranged from Vietnam to Bangladesh.

As specialists slowly map out the country’s flora and fauna, it is becoming obvious the Kingdom boasts a large number of rare species, many of which are considered vulnerable or endangered.

“A species that is rare in Cambodia, is usually even rarer elsewhere,” says Hugo Rainey, technical advisor with Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

Rainey himself is involved in the conservation of three critically endangered vulture species.

“The numbers of vultures globally are difficult to estimate as they’re declining at such a fast rate, that they’re disappearing before you can count them,” he says. In contrast, the latest vulture census conducted in Cambodia found 296 birds in the country, a record count that suggests the population is increasing.

The Siamese crocodile is another species that has found a haven in the Kingdom. Largely considered extinct, the species was rediscovered in 2000 in the Cardamom Mountains by a joint expedition by FFI and the Cambodian Forestry Administration.

“We estimate there are around 250 Siamese crocodiles in the wild,” says Adam Starr, coordinator of FFI’s Cambodian Crocodile Conservation Programme. “The majority of these are in Cambodia.”

Dangers Ahead

Illegal hunting and trading pose some of the greatest threats to wildlife in Cambodia. Demand from outside of the country drives the trade, with reptiles, turtles, snakes, monitor lizards and pangolins sold to Vietnam and China as specialty food or for Eastern medicine. Other animals, such as bears, are sold mainly as pets, while wild macaques are said to fetch a higher price than bred ones at research laboratories.

Previously, tigers also featured in the trade. Poaching however has decimated the species to the extent that hunting them is too time-consuming to be worthwhile.

The Wildlife Rapid Rescue Team (WRRT), a government run unit with technical assistance and financial support from Wildlife Alliance, reports it rescued 43,463 live animals between 2001 and 2010, as well as 21,062 dead ones.

Lesley Perlman, programme manager of the organisation, suspects that what is being caught is only the tip of the iceberg. “The larger wildlife trade networks are pretty sophisticated,” she says. “Also, the trade has over the past years gone increasingly underground.”

Still, efforts to curb poaching have met some success.

“Poaching is definitely down from 2001-2002,” says Maltby. He cites how no illegal elephant killings as a result of human-elephant conflict have occurred in the past five years, indicating the Cambodian elephant population has stabilised.

Capturing offenders is not enough, those involved in animal trading need to be prosecuted too. Although a legal framework for that exists in Cambodia, implementation is weak and those directing the trade often evade capture.

“You catch the guy with gun, but not the guy who gave him the gun,” says David Emmett, regional director of Conservation International.

He maintains many of those caught are never prosecuted, and following release simply return to the trade and re-offend.

“The disincentive to hunt wildlife is very low but, with some animals fetching hundreds of dollars in the wildlife trade, the incentive to hunt is still very high,” he says. “If the law were implemented in court as it is written, the threat to endangered wildlife in Cambodia would be much reduced.”

Focus on Communities

Poverty, allied to a lack of alternative livelihoods in rural areas, drives illegal hunting, pushing people to engage in other environmentally harmful activities such as logging, distilling sassafras oil, and slash-and-burn farming.

Conservationists maintain successful efforts to protect wildlife and biodiversity require the cooperation of communities living in and around protected areas.

“Any long term strategy that does not take people into account will fail,” says Perlman.

Community-based resource management (CBRM) has been a popular approach to this end for some time. Aiming to combine poverty reduction with sustainable natural resource management, activities focus on engaging communities in conservation efforts and devising ways in which they can profit from these.

Successful efforts require more than informing villagers of the importance of preserving rare and endangered wildlife.

“You've got to listen to the needs of local communities and understand their local economy and culture,” says Emmett. “Then you can provide them with the alternative incomes that they want, rather than imposing our values on them by simply telling them that they cannot hunt animals.” 

Ecotourism presents one way in which communities can access an alternative income. Together with some 550 families in Chi Phat commune in the Southern Cardamoms Protected Forest, Wildlife Alliance has developed the Chi Phat ecotourism site. Activities have focused on making local attractions accessible through developing trails and camps for trekking and wildlife viewing, as well as improving infrastructure such as guesthouses and home-stays. 

All protected areas are not suitable for ecotourism. Recognising this, WCS works with communities in Preah Vihear to protect the critically endangered giant and white-shouldered ibis through rice production. Using wildlife-friendly farming techniques, participating villages grow rice in areas inhabited by the bird. By offering a premium price for the rice, the scheme provides villagers a clear financial incentive to protect the habitat of the birds. 

Vast Greens

Before community-based schemes can take place, the boundaries of protected areas need to be determined.

“The most effective way to protect wildlife is to identify areas that contain large populations of many different species, and to effectively protect those areas and the animals that live within them,” says Emmett.

In Cambodia, an impressive quarter of the country has been designated as protected area, compared to a regional average of just over 8 per cent according to UN-ESCAP. 

According to Teak Seng, country director of WWF-Cambodia, the large amount of protected areas in Cambodia is one of the government’s main achievements in terms of conservation during the past two decades. 

“This is an exceptionally large area gazetted for the protection of biodiversity,” he says. “Only a few countries in the world have achieved such a high figure.”

Others are not convinced that more is better when it comes to conservation.

“25 percent of the country is too big and unrealistic to manage sustainably,” says Maltby.

Not unique to Cambodia, lack of funds and scarcity of resources means it is difficult to police and maintain large protected areas.

Maltby also notes there is little justification anymore. “When the protected areas were drawn up in 1993, their boundaries were based on the best information available,” he says. “At that time, wildlife was much more abundant, but that however has now sadly changed in some areas.”

As more baseline surveys on the country’s biodiversity become available, the debate has turned to whether focusing efforts on smaller areas might actually be more effective.

Emmett certainly thinks so. 

“There are way too many protected areas for them to be properly managed,” he says, adding that probably only around two thirds of the currently protected areas are needed to protect all wildlife species and the most important ecosystems in Cambodia. The rest could be degazetted to make way for more effective, targeted conservation in the remaining areas.

Changes are already taking place.

In September this year, it was reported almost 10,000ha of a wildlife sanctuary in Preah Vihear and Kampong Thom had been reclassified as state private land, paving the way for development. 

Conversely, previously unprotected areas have gained protection status. Three years of lobbying by conservationists paid off in 2009 when the Seima area in Mondulkiri was declared a protected forest. Home to more than 60 globally threatened, near-threatened, or data deficient species, its new status ensures better protection is given to the key habitats, while allowing for sustainable use of natural resources by local communities.

Pressure to Develop

Seima is the exception to the rule, however. More land is likely to be declassified from being protected, than the other way round. The pressure for Cambodia to develop has already led to land in protected areas being granted as economic land concessions.

This is a move some conservationists fear will prove the deathblow to Cambodia’s biodiversity.

While agricultural expansion poses its own threats, large scale developments such as hydro dams are singled out as being particularly detrimental.

“In protected areas, they are a threat like no other known before,” says Starr.

He describes how a joint FFI and Forestry Administration land-use planning project in the Central Cardamoms came under threat only a year after it was successfully completed.

“In 2007 the Ministry of Industry, Mines, and Energy signed an agreement for a hydro dam to be built in the area,” he says. “When completed, sections of villages and surrounding community lands will be inundated with water.”

Other parts of the Cardamoms are also in danger. Recently, plans to build a titanium mine across some 15,000 to 20,000 hectares of the mountains, about a third of which constitutes a protected area, became public.

Michael Zwirn, head of Wildlife Alliance’s US operations, describes the effects on wildlife as “very serious”. In particular, the organisation argues the mine would imperil freshwater species, including the Siamese crocodile, as well as disrupt the migratory route of endangered Asian elephants.

Pearlman adds that the Chi Phat ecotourism site, on which the organisation has spent half a million dollars and community members now rely, would be “devastated”.

Emmett however argues that the threat posed by the concessions is less to do with the amount of land conceded, and more with the increased numbers of people development projects will bring into protected areas.

“For example, if you have a land concession that’s going to destroy even as much as 20,000 ha out of a landscape of 1.5 million ha of contiguous forest, the animals would just move to the bigger area,” he says. “The only reason the animals would be under threat would be if people who move to that land concession then go out hunting, or if there are so many land concessions that the forest is totally fragmented.”  

Part of the current problem is the lack of transparency in terms of where concessions are granted.

“People are not consulted on the concessions,” says Maltby. Instead, affected communities and conservation groups sometimes only find out an area is slated for development when the bulldozers and excavators arrive.

Emmett suggests conservationists are partly to blame for this by alienating the government with arguments for blanket protection of existing protected areas.

“Conservation NGOs should engage with the government to explore ways of combining conservation goals and development,” he says.

Money Talks

More than anything else, however, the problem Cambodia faces is that conservation is a luxury. Experience from almost every developed country shows protection of wildlife and habitats comes later, often only after ecosystems have been decimated.

The intrinsic value of biodiversity and untouched ecosystems is unlikely to convince Cambodia to protect its natural heritage. Making the business case on the other hand might just work.

“The reality is that wildlife conservation is often a low priority for developing countries with high poverty, so it must be done in a way that also supports human well-being and national development plans,” says Emmett. “For conservation to work, we need to identify ways for protected areas to benefit the economy of the country.” 

REDD could be one such scheme. An acronym for “reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation”, REDD schemes aim to fight climate change by giving developing countries’ financial incentives to preserve forests. By protecting the habitats of rare animals, these measures also contribute towards wildlife conservation.  

“REDD is the most promising way forward,” says Rainey. “A country needs to be able to fund its own conservation.”

Emmett agrees.

“Some protected areas make no money for the country, others prevent it from losing money,” he says. “REDD actually generates money. If it works, it could be huge.”

Though Cambodia at the moment is not even a pilot country in the UN-led scheme, a project led by Pact Cambodia in Oddar Meanchey is faring well, while WCS is working at two other potential sites to get the scheme off the ground in Cambodia.

One of the WCS demonstration sites is Seima Protection Forest. Work there started in mid-2008 with a feasibility study, which concluded that millions of tons of carbon emissions could be avoided by preserving the forest.

“If WCS can make the REDD work in Seima, then that’s a model that can be used in other parts of Cambodia,” says Emmett. Given the amount of investors queuing up for land concessions, he accepts that the government is unlikely to endorse more REDD projects unless profitability is demonstrated in the initial schemes.

There is a long way to go. Globally, carbon trading schemes are yet to prove their worth, while Cambodia remains a small country with tenure security problems, meaning it hardly tops the international investment list.

Another largely untapped conservation strategy is wide-scale ecotourism. Though community-based efforts exist here and there, there is little in terms of a national network and joint promotion.

Conservation and mass tourism has worked in other countries, such as Costa Rica. Closer to home, Thailand has seen a growing market for ecotourism over the last decade. Though the jury is out on how successful schemes have been in protecting biodiversity and promoting community development, ecotourism has brought money into the country.

Where Next?

The future of Cambodia’s biodiversity depends on money. Will preserving rare ecosystems and their species be more lucrative than hunting down animals and developing the land they used to live on? 

Counter-intuitively, more effective protection of the Kingdom’s unique biodiversity may be achieved through more targeted efforts in smaller protected areas. Such an approach would make space for some development, while the potential income generated from protected areas through schemes such as REDD could pave the way for sustainable natural resource management.

These are potential options, but what seems certain is that without definite commitment one way or another, Neang Thy and his colleagues may soon end up discovering new species only for them to be subsequently declared extinct. Today’s gecko could become tomorrow’s dodo.