One afternoon at the end of 2017, officials in Dakrong district in Central Vietnam’s Quang Tri province visited Ho Thi Nieng’s house. They claimed she and her husband had “burned the protected forest to do farming.”

“We had been cultivating that land for a long time and there had never been a problem,” 26-year-old Nieng, who belongs to the Van Kieu ethnic minority in Ta Leng village, said as she recalled her panic at the accusation.

The following year, in 2018, the young mother was sentenced to nine months in jail for burning the forest to farm it. Nieng’s husband, Ho Van Hai, 32, was also charged with the same crime, but received a suspended sentence – he was only “helping his wife” and had two young children.

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When Sia Beng Hok goes to check his rubber and batai (Moluccan albizia) trees, he makes sure he has a rifle on the backseat of his four-wheel drive.

His plantations – all 5,000 hectares (19sq miles) of them – sit on forest reserve land in Kelantan state, in the northeast of the Malaysian peninsula – and the rifle is vital to kill or scare away wild animals.

“There are all sorts of them. Wild boars, snakes, panthers, elephants,” Sia said. But for the larger plots, he resorts to other measures, running electric fences up to 10km (6 miles) long to keep out elephants that might otherwise destroy his rubber trees.

Sia, wiry and tanned from more than 30 years in the logging industry, began planting trees for timber in 2008. He speaks of his work with pride, calling it “ecological” because his workers cut and replant the trees in cycles.

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When Myanmar’s military staged a coup more than one year ago and seized power from a democratically-elected civilian government, not only did it undo a decade of opening up the country that brought a degree of freedom and prosperity to ordinary citizens, it also condemned the country’s rich biodiversity and ecosystems. 

The coup was, and still is, a tragedy for both humans and nature in the Southeast Asian nation.

Myanmar is a country with a long history of state-sanctioned over-exploitation of natural resources – from minerals and precious stones to forests and oil and gas – which enriched the top generals beyond imagination, but also resulted in a polluted and degraded environment, human rights abuses and decades-long conflicts. 

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Since October 2020, Thailand’s national parks authority has demolished or ordered the demolition of more than 20 luxury mansions, resorts and tourist hotels illegally built in national parks throughout the country’s Western Forest Complex, a globally significant biodiversity conservation corridor.

Among the properties already demolished are a 3.2-hectare (8-acre) resort with 20 bungalows, allegedly belonging to the daughter of a retired general, and a 17-bungalow resort reportedly owned by a retired general. Other demolished properties include a mansion belonging to the owner of a milk factory, and a floating hotel with a blue granite swimming pool.

Fifteen of the properties already torn down or awaiting demolition sat on the banks of the Srinakarin Dam’s 420-square-kilometer (162-square-mile) reservoir. The old-growth tropical forests surrounding the reservoir form an integral part of Srinakarin Dam National Park.

Six others sat in Sai Yok National Park, on the banks of the world-famous Kwai Noi River.

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Over the past decade, the European Union entered into collaborative agreements with tropical timber-producing countries to fight forest crime and verify the legality of wood imported into the EU.

Within the Greater Mekong, Vietnam was the first (and to date, only) country to sign such a voluntary partnership agreement (VPA) with the EU, back in 2018. The VPA is a legally binding trade agreement where both sides commit to trading only in verified legal timber products.

Under the VPA, timber-supplying countries have to set up a timber legality assurance system capable of verifying the legality of their timber products. Once operational, the system will issue special EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (EU FLEGT) licenses to accompany exports of verified legal timber products into the EU. Such licensed products are considered to comply with the requirements of existing EU timber regulations, which prohibit the sale of illegally harvested timber and timber products on the EU market.

Now that Vietnam has signed the VPA, it will have to draft new regulations to build up an effective assurance system. Outside the Greater Mekong, another Southeast Asian country offers a glimpse of what this future might look like: Indonesia, which signed the VPA in 2013 and began FLEGT licensing in 2016.

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We were seated near a lush river in the Southern Cardamom Mountains, huddled over a lunch of chicken and rice, when the tip came in via text message: Someone had passed along the location of a poaching camp.

Within minutes, the entire group — including Darian Thackwell, the head ranger, and four of his armed team members — was rushing upstream. Eventually we hid our boat between a maze of mangroves and continued by foot, trudging our way as silently as possible through the thick vegetation.

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The post Inside the Campaign to Save an Imperiled Cambodian Rainforest first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

The Lower Mekong Region is home to around 100 CITES-listed tree species. These include CITES Appendix-II timber-producing species of rosewoods (genus Dalbergia), yew trees (genus Taxus spp.), and agarwood (genus Aquilaria), some of which are highly valuable for international trade.

This has made some of these species a target for illegal logging and trafficking. Local enforcement authorities and Customs agencies are in the front lines of the battle against wildlife crime. They must be equipped with the best knowledge and tools available to detect and deter trafficking, notably by performing inspections on suspicious shipments.

From 25 to 29 October 2021, the Secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) hosted an online workshop on physical inspection of timber shipments in the Lower Mekong Region.

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With a lifetime dedicated to forest conservation, Dr. Apichart Pattaratuma reflected back on his career and what forest management means to Thailand. In the year 1978, he received the prestigious United Nations and Ananda Mahidol Foundation Scholarship to attain higher education at the College of Forest Resources, University of Washington, Seattle, USA. After graduating in the year 1985, he returned to Thailand with a commitment to teach and research at the Department of Forest Management, Faculty of Forestry, Kasetsart University until his retirement with full professor position. The excerpts below encapsulated a conversation between Dr. Pattaratuma and Dr. Rattana Lao on forest conservation.

Beyond the classroom: An anthropological perspective

I dedicated my life to study the anthropological aspect of forest management to His Majesty King Bhumibol Aduyadej of Thailand. I studied cultural dimensions of forest management in many areas of Thailand. I began with Huay Hin Dam with Karen hill tribe (Pra-ka-ker -yor) Suphanburi Province. I tried to review the international literature on land use and combine it with in-depth interviews with the hill tribes to understand the cultural dimensions of their livelihoods. I observed how they built their houses and how their managed their forest. There are three characteristics of the Karen tribe. Firstly, they lived on small plots of lands and their houses are very small. Secondly, they conserve their forest land with water resources. Thirdly, they refrain from using pesticides. Culturally, there is a clear division of labor amongst men and women. While men will clear the lands, women will cultivate agricultural goods such as papaya, guava and banana. There is limited drugs use.

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Southeast Asia is home to roughly half of the world’s tropical mountain forests. These highland ecosystems support massive carbon stores and tremendous biodiversity, including a host of species that occur nowhere else on the planet. But new evidence suggests these havens are in grave danger. Conversion of higher-elevation forest to cropland is accelerating at an unprecedented rate throughout the region, according to findings published June 28 in Nature Sustainability.

By analyzing high-resolution satellite data sets of forest loss and state-of-the-art maps of carbon density and terrain, an international team of researchers quantified patterns of forest loss in Southeast Asia during the first two decades of this century. They found that during the 2000s, forest loss was mainly concentrated in the lowlands; but by the 2010s, it had shifted significantly to higher ground.

Between 2001 and 2019, the researchers calculated that Southeast Asia had lost 610,000 square kilometers (235,500 square miles) of forest — an area larger than Thailand. Of this loss, 31% occurred in mountainous regions, equivalent to 189,100 km² (73,000 mi²) of highland forest converted to cropland and plantation in less than two decades.

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Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha on Tuesday said his administration won’t use force against ethnic Karen villagers living in Phetchaburi’s Kaeng Krachan National Park as past governments did.

Instead, this government will take care of those living in Bang Kloi by ensuring they have proper jobs and a place to live, he said.

The promise was made after local groups in Phetchaburi threatened to hold a rally outside Government House if the government fails to take decisive action against Karen villagers whom they said were destroying the forest.

“We are not going to let anyone destroy Kaeng Krachan’s forests anymore. If the PM refuses to take action against the villagers, Phetchaburi residents will have no choice but to demand negotiations with the prime minister,” said Sumol Sutaviriyawat, president of an environmental conservation club in Phetchaburi.

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