J1070NC BeTreed
Cambodia, Southeast Asia
In partnership with Our Future Organisation
The Situation
Preah Vihear province still contains significant forest reserves and both areas border wildlife sanctuaries. Illegal land grabbing, logging and wildlife poaching are all strategies that families near forest areas engage in to meet their need for emergency cash, for debt servicing, for income gaps and for livelihood investments. Climate change disasters are increasingly affecting rural families, who suffer from cycles of drought and flooding, destructive storms, unpredictable agricultural seasons, and increasing temperatures. Watersheds are increasingly compromised through conversion of forest into agriculture. Lack of effective protection from illegal forest activities has resulted in poor outcomes for nature and ecosystem services that nature provide to communities. Phnom Thnout Phnom Pok Wildlife Sanctuary and its surrounding communities is the focus for an extended program for community livelihoods and community conservation.
The Objectives
To empower communities for a sustainable future through supporting activities that protect the environment and natural resources that are impacted by these communities, for communities around a rural primary school and the Phnom Thnout Phnom Pok Wildlife Sanctuary, including 7 surrounding communities/villages.
Communities can benefit from protecting forests and biodiversity and can develop strategies that address root causes of poverty, debt and poor living standards and opportunity. This project is therefore looking to engage communities to:
- protect the natural resources and biodiversity
- design programs that will support their own development and sustainable livelihood goals and also conservation outcomes
- implement these programs developed by communities.
Through these measures, communities will be better positioned to first understand the importance of the environment surrounding their villages and the benefits that they receive from protecting these; and second, to initiate activities that are important to their own needs. This process of design and implementation will be a system prototype for when financing becomes available through other sources supporting long-term community engagement in development planning.
J1070NC