Environment and natural resources

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. ...

Hundreds of kilograms of dead fish have washed up on the shores of the Mekong in Stung Treng’s Thala Barivat district in the past month, and while environmental activists blame construction of the controversial Don Sahong dam upstream, officials yesterday said the fish are being ...

Over-exploitation of the Kingdom’s underground water sources has contributed to the water scarcity problem faced by the country during the past two years of drought, relief organisations said yesterday. ...

The Don Sahong hydroelectric dam threatens the last 80 Irrawaddy dolphins in the Mekong River – as well as the livelihoods of the people downstream in Cambodia, who depend heavily on the river’s resources. ...

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.   ...

Officials and environmentalists have congratulated Vietnam and the United States on a recent climate changed agreement signed between the two former adversaries, saying the co-operation will have a positive impact on mitigating the effects of the phenomenon in the region. ...

Sihanoukville officials have prioritised cracking down on businesses that allow sewage to drain into the sea, deputy governor Chhin Seng Nguon said yesterday.   ...

The government has allocated $5 million across the Kingdom’s 46 sub-districts and towns to help with waste management by national and local institutions. ...

About 100 kilograms of pig and dear meat was seized on Wednesday night after police chased down a luxury car in Kratie town’s Orusey commune, deputy chief of the Provincial Economic Police Unit Major Rin Veansa said. ...

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 Environment Ministry on Friday released its final study on the algal bloom that forced swimmers out of the water in Kep province in early April, stating no chemical substances were found in the bloom that would have negatively affected human or animal health. ...

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. ...

About 1,000 hectares of flooded forest in Preah Sihanouk’s Prey Nup district, all of which is overseen by the provincial fisheries department, is under threat of being systemically divided and sold to a private company, according to officials. ...

An environmental youth group has asked the National Assembly’s head of the Environment and Water Resource Commission, Pol Hom, to visit and investigate the pollution that will be caused by construction of Laos’ Don Sahong hydropower dam. ...

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.   ...