Battambang residents will be miserable if they don’t protect the remaining forests in the province, Interior Minister Sar Kheng said at an annual provincial meeting, imploring officials to think long-term.
Residents say they have no employment opportunities in Kampong Speu’s Oral district, forcing them to log a nearby forest to earn a living, but only after paying local officials a bribe.
Forest watchers in 2020 filed 90 percent fewer reports of illegal logging amid officials’ threats against community patrols, according to an international research report, as one advocate said young people were refraining from joining patrols out of fear of repercussions.
Preah Vihear’s Prey Preah Roka Wildlife Sanctuary is dotted with clearings and fresh stumps. As a local patroller walks through the protected forest, he points out dozens of logged areas, many now being cultivated by local residents. Some say they were pushed out from plantation land or are struggling with debt.
Alleging renewed large-scale illegal logging, environmentalists around the Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary said authorities should take action to stop deforestation before it was too late, just as officials had reclaimed 60,000 hectares of protected flooded forests around the Tonle Sap lake.
Following Prime Minister Hun Sen’s command two weeks ago to stop the Tonle Sap’s destruction, provincial governors say they have retaken thousands of hectares of protected flooded forests but are still working on investigating perpetrators.
Hun Sen launched into a tirade on Sunday against alleged “anarchic deforestation” along the Tonle Sap lake, even ordering the use of the “infantry, navy, and helicopters” to crackdown on land grabbing and encroachment.
On patrol in Keo Seima, community members clash over deforestation and chainsaws. At the front line of a multibillion-dollar global climate-change program, Mondulkiri’s volunteer patrollers say they feel powerless as their reports of logging are ignored.
Cambodia was among a minority of countries who did not sign a pledge to conserve and expand its forested ecosystems at COP26 last week despite forest loss being the country’s highest source of greenhouse gas emissions.
About 10 community members patrolled O’Reang district’s Sen Monorom commune on Wednesday and found about 100 hectares of the sanctuary and 12 hectares of community forest being cleared by machinery
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