Forests and forestry

Sambo the elephant will not be allowed to return to work in Phnom Penh, because both City Hall and the Forestry Administration oppose the idea, the FA’s director-general said yesterday. The 54-year-old Sambo left the city in 2012 after decades of entertaining and giving rides to ...

Cambodia Ministry of Tourism hopes to encourage international tourists to visit coastal areas and ecotourism destinations to take pressure off Siem Reap. The ministry’s marketing & promotion department representative, Hou Sokhom, told TTR Weekly that the country needs to encourage tourists to travel more to other ...

Filthy trucks loaded with luxury timber rule the red-earth roads in this heavily deforested district. Each day, dozens of 10-wheelers bounce along the pot-holed roads, carting logs of the much-sought Thnong timber. And while some of the cargo is legal, much of it is not. ...

Four Cambodian nationals who had been incarcerated in Thailand for logging and illegally crossing the border were released on Monday after completing their prison terms, officials said yesterday. Touch Ra, deputy director of the Chaom-Sa Ngaom international border checkpoint in Oddar Meanchey province, said two of ...

A British conservation group says its hidden cameras have taken photos of a wild cattle species in an area in Siem Reap province where it was previously thought to be extinct. In a statement released Wednesday, Fauna and Flora International said the cameras recorded six individual ...

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said Thursday that environmental protection is the most important measure to ensure the sustainable development of economy and society. In his message on the 42nd International Environment Day that falls on June 5, Hun Sen said the government is committed to ...

Some 400 students, monks and activists were stopped from a peaceful march for Environmental Day on Thursday, as they sought to deliver petitions to the Ministry of Environment and other institutions calling for an end to deforestation. Cambodia’s forests provide many services to the rural poor, ...

Police in Kompong Thom province Wednesday arrested seven people allegedly involved in an illegal checkpoint racket, while an eighth escaped with handcuffs on and is at large. Shortly before 7 a.m., a joint task force of police and military police descended on an illegal checkpoint staffed ...

A series of high-flying creatures, including giant flying frogs and squirrels and a parachute gecko, are among the hundreds of exotic new species recently discovered in the greater Mekong region in southeast Asia. A new eyeless spider and a fish that mates head-to-head are also highlighted ...

The government of New Zealand on Wednesday signed up to provide Cambodia with 3.7 million U.S. dollars for the preservation and protection of Angkor Wat Temple, one of the world heritage sites, said a news statement from the Cambodian government. Bun Narith, director general of Apsara ...

A journalist has filed a complaint with the Pursat provincial court alleging that a soldier threatened to kill him on Sunday after he wrote a series of damning articles linking the soldier to illegal rosewood trafficking, court officials confirmed Tuesday. Both the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces ...

Indigenous villagers in Mondolkiri province say relevant authorities that are supposed to crack down on forestry crimes instead collude with logging companies and powerful businessmen, allowing them cut down trees. That has put their forest tribal traditions and livelihoods, which are dependent on forests, in ...

Prey Lang is one of Cambodia’s few remaining large forests, covering approximately 3,600 square kilometers across four northern provinces. The forest is home to about 200,000 mostly indigenous people, who depend on it for their livelihoods, according to the Prey Lang Community Network. But, the ...

Members of the Kuoy ethnic group captured two loggers and seized two chainsaws on Saturday, accusing the alleged loggers of felling resin trees illegally at Prey Preah Rokar community forest in Preah Vihear. ...

SIEM PANG DISTRICT, Stung Treng province – For the elite few granted the right to level swathes of woodland in the north of this remote province, the timber trade is worth a fortune. For the Forestry Administration—the government body charged with policing logging—business is also booming. While ...

Since he began making the perilous journey to Thailand to log rosewood 10 years ago, Sao Sophon* has had plenty of time to calculate the cost of dying. “When we cross the border to Thailand, our lives are equal to $80 or $90, because that is ...

Community forest chiefs and rights groups in Oddar Meanchey province say logging is now so rampant they have finally given up hope that a U.N.-backed scheme to generate millions of dollars worth of carbon credits for the area and the country will ever get off ...

A group of 15 local and international rights groups Tuesday sent a slew of letters to the Chinese government and companies involved in the Lower Sesan II hydropower dam in Stung Treng province seeking a halt to dam construction due to serious environmental and social ...

Two years after she was walked out of the city in the middle of the night to a quiet life of retirement on the outskirts of the capital, Sambo, Phnom Penh’s iconic and much-beloved elephant, might soon be back at work entertaining tourists. With funding for ...

More than 2,000 hectares of the decimated Lumphat Wildlife Sanctuary in Ratanakkiri province have been classified by the Ministry of Environment (MOE) as the sanctuary’s first community protected area. Surrounded by three economic land concessions in Kon Mom district, the protected area is populated by a ...

Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have never been higher, but Association of Southeast Asian Nations member countries are still failing to curb emissions created by heavy deforestation, according to a new report. Forest land in ASEAN countries declined by more than 6 per cent ...

Two draft laws on judicial reform were easily passed by the single-party National Assembly on Friday but the session was overshadowed by a rookie lawmaker’s attack on lax enforcement of forestry laws in Stung Treng province. On the fourth day of the third plenary session of ...

A forest activist in Kampong Thom province yesterday claimed to have been threatened with a knife by a soldier after reporting that the officer was behind a number of forest crimes in the area. Pen Bunkear, a soldier with the Kampong Thom military research unit, yesterday ...

World Wildlife Fund is taking to the internet to halt a hydropower project it claims will serve as the nail in the coffin for the critically endangered Irrawaddy dolphin. On Friday, WWF launched an online petition calling on the developers of Laos’s 120 megawatt Don Sahong ...