Environment and natural resources

The temples of Angkor in Cambodia are known for their lost-world feel, thanks in part to trees and vegetation that have colonized the structures. While giant roots and trunks pouring over ancient blocks and carvings look cool, the trees are actually a destructive force acting on ...

Tigers and black bears look nothing alike, but their identical names in some Khmer dialects left some thinking that one of Cambodia’s most endangered species may be attacking people in the Cardamom Mountains. Sitting outside his Santre commune home in Pursat province’s Kravanh district, with bandages ...

Activists working in Prey Lang forest have accused military and police officers of being behind two illegal timber hauls they have intercepted. In the first case, an estimated 50 cubic metres of timber being transported through Kampong Thom’s Sandan district on homemade tractors was found last ...

Conservationists Fauna and Flora International was to send a team to Pursat province today to investigate a man’s claim that he was attacked by a tiger. Ngem Nget, a 51-year-old farmer in Phnom Kravanh district’s Santre commune, reported that while foraging in the Cardamom Mountains on ...

In Samrong Leu village, a picturesque community nestled deep in the verdant fields of Kors Kralor district, the acrid smell of smoke fills the air. Outside almost every house in this community, billows of smoke continuously emerge from the domes of homemade mud kilns, drifting around ...

A Pursat man’s reported encounter with a tiger in the Cardamom Mountains has left him injured and in fear, but it has left experts in doubt. On Sunday afternoon, Ngem Nget, a 51-year-old farmer in Phnom Kravanh district’s Santre commune, walked into the woods to forage ...

About 400 monks and villagers protested Sunday outside Wat Koh Puthivong pagoda in Phnom Penh’s Sen Sok district to protest what they say is a real estate company’s encroachment onto the pagoda’s land, including an island that monks consider sacred. During the protest, dozens of young ...

Military police joined forces with the Fisheries Administration in Kompong Thom province on Friday to arrest six men and confiscate four bulldozers being used to clear protected flooded forest in Stong district’s fisheries conservation area, officials said Sunday. District military police commander Khun Bunho said that ...

A fishing community that abandoned a stretch of the Tonle Sap river in Phnom Penh’s Russey Keo district earlier this month after dead fish began appearing in the water have brought their floating houses back home, authorities and community representatives said yesterday. The 29 families who ...

Camera traps have captured six individual banteng (Bos javanicus) in Siem Reap Province, north-western Cambodia, in an area where the endangered wild cattle species was thought to be extinct. The banteng discovery in Cambodia’s north-west is significant, as few populations remain in the region due ...

Mixed security forces led by Kratie province’s court prosecutor yesterday arrested six people in a huge illegal logging bust, confiscating more than 100 cubic metres of protected luxury-grade timber. ...

Mixed security forces led by Kratie province’s court prosecutor yesterday arrested six people in a huge illegal logging bust, confiscating more than 100 cubic metres of protected luxury-grade timber. The arrests of both Cambodian and Vietnamese nationals were the culmination of a three-day crackdown by prosecutor ...

Preah Vihear officials abruptly barred environmental activists from holding a planned public forum Wednesday, with the activists claiming it was for political reasons and officials saying the group had failed to go through the proper channels. Seng Sokheng, secretariat coordinator of Community Peace Building Network, said ...

US credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s has ranked Cambodia’s economy and creditworthiness as the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Of 116 nations measured by S&P as part of a vulnerability index published last month – with a number 1 ranking being the ...

A team of international researchers have discovered a unique species of wolf snake in South East Asia. Some magnificent creatures still lay hidden in Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains, waiting to be found, analysed and categorised by researchers working in the area. Since 2000 scientists working for Fauna and ...

A Battambang bridge project isn’t to blame for blocking a river and preventing water from reaching parched rice fields, an Asian Development Bank investigation concluded yesterday. Bavel district farmers accused the bank-funded construction project of choking the river since construction began in December, leaving their recently ...

Mondulkiri provincial police charged four men with illegal logging and immigration crimes after they allegedly caught the suspects collecting wood in O’Raing district. Vietnamese nationals Orng Minh Chhung, 30; Le Vantieng, 38; Tvan Taktech, 33; and Thvang Vanthai, 36, were arrested while gathering freshly cut pieces ...

A Sihanoukville construction project isn’t pulling out all the stops so much as plugging all the drains, leaving neighbouring residents to stew in murky floodwaters, villagers say. Last month, while levelling out the 20-hectare plot, construction workers dumped dirt in front of two large drainage pipes, ...

Chroy Changva district governor Klaing Huot, who was one of six Phnom Penh district governors to take up a post Monday, vowed to tackle rampant sand-dredging in the Mekong River during his appointing ceremony. Mr. Huot, who moved from his post as Russei Keo district governor ...

A construction worker was struck dead and six others were injured on Sunday in Oddar Meanchey’s Anglong Veng district, marking the second death by lightning in the area in the past three months, a commune police chief said. ...

When Cambodia’s most prominent forest activist, Chut Wutty, was gunned down in April 2012, the community network he created to sabotage the rampant deforestation of this vast forest fragmented. The forest patrols that he organised nearly ground to a halt. Without money to fund large-scale expeditions, ...

The Cambodian Ministry of Environment and the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on Monday signed a five-year cooperation agreement with an aim to reduce climate impacts on agriculture, according to a joint statement. The agreement was inked jointly by Cambodian Minister of Environment Say ...

A 21-year-old Cambodian man was allegedly shot by Thai soldiers on Thursday after crossing the border to illegally log rosewood, officials in Oddar Meanchey province said yesterday. Nhan Sarom, O’Smach deputy commune chief, told the Post> that border soldiers opened fire on a group of more than ...

As the sun rises on Tonle Sap Lake, fishermen head out from floating villages like this one, past half-submerged mangroves and flooded shrub land, to check their nets, much as they have for centuries. Every year, the lake yields about 300,000 tons of fish, making it ...