Cambodia to add one million hectares of protected forest, amid rapid deforestation
The move, which covers five new areas of forest, will bump Cambodia’s conservation zones up by a fifth, bringing more than a quarter of the country’s land under protection
Cambodia’s prime minister has ordered a million hectares of forest be included in protected zones as the country faces one of the world’s fastest deforestation rates.
The move, which covers five new areas of forest, will bump Cambodia’s conservation zones up by a fifth, bringing more than a quarter of the country’s land under protection.
“The Ministry of Environment must ... list the five forests as protected areas,” said the order signed by Prime Minister Hun Sen.
The new conservation areas will include parts of Prey Lang – a forest where activists have long been risking their lives to expose the illegal logging that has eviscerated Cambodia’s forest cover.
The lucrative trade, lubricated by violence and bribery of forestry officials and border guards, has seen around a third of the country’s forests cleared in the past thirty years.
Hun Sen has been in power throughout that time, but conservationists say he has made little headway in reducing illegal logging despite trumpeting several crackdowns.