Forests and forestry

The government is failing to protect Cambodia’s forests, activists, civil society groups and students said during yesterday’s World Environment Day celebration in Phnom Penh. ...

Rewards will be given to those who provide local police with the exact time and place that illegal timber is transported through the Ton Hon Cambodia-Vietnam border checkpoint, the Kampot provincial police chief said yesterday. ...

Forestry officials in Svay Rieng province on Wednesday said border guards prevented them from seizing and inspecting a trio of trucks suspected of smuggling luxury wood into Vietnam, flagging the convoy through despite their protests. ...

Legal timber exports to Vietnam – the bulk of them rosewood – soared between 2013 and 2015, with the volume of logs exported increasing by a factor of 142 and seven times as much sawn wood passing across the border, according to a report by ...

Cambodia’s population of spotted Indochinese leopards will be extinct by 2018 unless action is taken to deal with the “snaring crisis” in Mondolkiri province, where the few remaining leopards live, according to the author of a forthcoming paper on the issue.   ...

Two trucks loaded with illegal timber were confiscated and five men were arrested en route to Vietnam on Sunday night in Kratie province’s Chet Borei district, according to Military Police who made the arrests. ...

The government has reversed course on a controversial decision to downsize the proposed boundaries of a long-awaited protected area for the beleaguered Prey Lang Forest, the largest lowland evergreen forest left in Southeast Asia.   ...

The owner of a luxury timber shop in Phnom Penh was fined 64.189 million riel (about $16,047) in absentia yesterday after being convicted of transporting, trading and stocking timber without authorization from the Forest Administration, according to court officials.     ...

Minister of Environment Say Sam Al has sent a letter to the Minister of Land Management, Urban Planning and Construction asking to register nearly six million  hectares of land as protected under the Ministry of the Environment.    ...

More than 100 pieces of luxury rosewood bearing Cambodian names and a phone number were found by Thai police and forest conservation officers in a national park in Thailand’s Sa Kaeo province on Tuesday.   ...

In a startling admission yesterday, the Ministry of Agriculture finally acknowledged that the Kingdom’s forest cover has decreased rapidly over the past few decades, down from a high of 73 percent in 1965 to now, where only 49.5 percent of the country’s forests remain. ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen has signed a sub-decree to mark 18 protected areas over nearly three million hectares of land across Prey Lang forest, according to a Ministry of Environment statement released yesterday. ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday confirmed official announcements made on Monday that about 70,000 cubic meters of timber confiscated by the National Anti-Deforestation Committee (NADC) would be put up for auction, reneging on his previous statement that the timber would go to the Education Ministry ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen on Tuesday retracted an order to use all illegally logged wood seized by the government to build schools and housing for teachers, arguing that they would struggle to carry the wood out of the forest.   ...

Before it takes action on ‘relocating’ Indian tigers, Cambodia’s forestry administration is on a special mission – scouting for signs of indigenous tigers in its dense jungles, where according to reports they are “functionally extinct”.   ...

Top officials on Monday said the government would be auctioning off some of the 70,000 cubic meters of wood authorities have seized in recent months, backtracking on a recent pledge Hun Sen made to stop the sales. ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday told Cambodians to stop hunting and poisoning wild birds, whose populations are already under strain from drought and forest fires.   ...

Twenty-nine Cambodian men were arrested while logging rosewood in the mountains of Thailand’s Prachinburi province on Wednesday, the Foreign Affairs Ministry said in a statement on Friday.  ...

Nine Cambodians were arrested and sent back to Cambodia from Thailand yesterday after Thai soldiers allegedly caught them logging illegally in the Dangrek Mountains. ...

Soldiers allegedly protecting an illegal logging operation in Oddar Meanchey threatened to shoot a group of forest patrollers that stumbled across their logging site on Sunday, Rattanak Rokha community forest patrol leader Chea Chuong said yesterday, though an RCAF commander denied the account. ...

A landmark decision by Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen could see almost a million hectares of forest reclassified as protected areas in a country with one of the highest deforestation rates in the world.​ But the order, circulated on Friday, to transfer control of the sites ...

The core of one of Cambodia’s most important and abused forests —Prey Lang—was officially de­clared a protected area this week af­ter years of campaigning by local ac­tivists and foreign conservationists.    ...

After setting up the National Anti-Deforestation Committee (NADC) in an attempt to show that the government was trying to stop illegal logging, Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday called on all citizens to join the battle, saying people even had the right to make citizen arrests ...

The smuggling of illegally cut timber from northeastern Cambodia’s Ratanakiri  province to Vietnam has dramatically increased since around April 17, with smugglers traveling the roads between the two countries day and night, sources in the region say. ...