Category: CAMBODIA
Blaze destroys 500 hectares of rubber plantation
Blaze destroys 500 hectares of rubber plantation
April 1, 2019
Sen David / Khmer Times
More than 500 hectares of a rubber plantation on Saturday were destroyed in a blaze that spread from a forest fire in Kampong Thom province’s Santuk district.
According to a National Police report yesterday, the forest blaze spread to 530 hectares of the rubber plantation in Ti Por commune.
“Authorities used seven fire trucks to extinguish it and 530 hectares out of 800 hectares of the plantation were destroyed,” it said. “The blaze spread from a nearby forest.”
Thiv Van Thy, provincial Agriculture Department director, yesterday said the rubber plantation belongs to Korean company BNA.
“The company invested in the rubber plantation in that area and 530 hectares of it have been destroyed,” he said.
Neth Pheaktra, spokesman of the Ministry of Environment, yesterday said Cambodia is now suffering from the El Nino weather phenomenon which is causing a hot and dry spell, noting that rains are not forecast for another two months.
He said wildfires, due to human and natural factors, can easily occur because of the hot and dry conditions.
“The main cause of fires is through burning to clear forests for planting crops, resettlement or catching wildlife,” he said.
In January, the ministry issued a forest fire alert over the dry season. It said people must be careful not to burn waste in or around protected forests and local authorities must also prepare contingency plans to fight forest fires to prevent the flames from spreading.
The ministry said that in case of a serious forest fire, the authorities should immediately alert people living nearby and evacuate animals.
“After a forest fire, the authorities must also collaborate with relevant sub-national administrations to prohibit people from inhabiting the cleared areas to allow for regrowth,” it added.
The ministry also reminded people that it is an offense to intentionally cause a fire in a protected area and those caught will be punished according to the law.
It added that it is confident that the public and relevant authorities will heed its warning.
Link: https://www.khmertimeskh.com/50592049/blaze-destroys-500-hectares-of-rubber-plantation/
Environment Ministry responds to deforestation claim
Environment Ministry responds to deforestation claim
March 28, 2019
Khuon Narim / Khmer Times
Cambodian PM Vows to Shoot Loggers From Helicopters, Again
Cambodian PM Vows to Shoot Loggers From Helicopters, Again
Published: Tuesday, 02 October 2018 16:33
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen promised on Sunday that he would fix his country’s problems with rampant deforestation by shooting those who illegally chop down timber from helicopters.
“It’s correct that we are losing our forests, many are being replaced by rubber plantations,” he said, speaking to members of the Cambodian diaspora in New York.
“I acknowledge that thieves have illegally cut down timber and I am ordering them to be shot from helicopters in the sky.”
Hun Sen made a similar promise two and a half years earlier when he announced that General Sao Sokha, newly appointed as head of a task force to stop illegal logging and timber smuggling, was authorized to fire rockets at loggers from helicopters.
That order came a year after a Global Witness report showed that Hun Sen’s own personal advisor, Try Pheap, headed an illegal logging network that saw millions of dollars of rosewood smuggled to China each year.
Not a shot has been fired from helicopters since that order and the task force did not succeed in halting the flow of luxury timber across Cambodia’s borders to Vietnam.
Hun Sen’s relatives have also long been linked with the country’s illegal timber business.
With hectares of forest falling to loggers and economic land concessions dished out by Cambodia’s ruling party, the country has one of the world’s highest rates of deforestation.
Global Witness meanwhile estimates that evictions that have resulted from logging and the government giving land to agribusinesses have displaced 830,000 people, forcing some into squatting in state forests or cutting down timber themselves.
Speaking Sunday, however, Hun Sen emphasized that it was the country’s now-defunct opposition–whose leader is in exile and whose deputy leader is just out of prison–that should be blamed for illegal logging.
“In many cases [the thieves] went to cut down millions of hectares to cultivate farmlands, including groups [affiliated] with the former opposition,” he said.
Source Link: https://www.occrp.org/en/daily/8677-cambodian-pm-vows-to-shoot-loggers-from-helicopters-again
Future without intact forests?
Future without intact forests?
Despite a decades-long effort to halt deforestation, nearly 10 percent of undisturbed forests have been fragmented, degraded or simply chopped down since 2000, according to the analysis of satellite imagery.
Average daily loss over the first 17 years of this century was more than 200 square kilometers.
“Degradation of intact forest represents a global tragedy, as we are systematically destroying a crucial foundation of climate stability,” said Frances Seymour, a senior distinguished fellow at the World Resources Institute (WRI), and a contributor to the research, presented this week at a conference in Oxford.
“Forests are the only safe, natural, proven and affordable infrastructure we have for capturing and storing carbon.”
The findings come as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and five major conservation organizations launched a five-year plan, Nature4Climate, to better leverage land use in reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that drive global warming.
“Thirty-seven percent of what is needed to stay below two degrees Celsius” – the cornerstone goal of the 196-nation Paris Agreement – “can be provided by land”, said Andrew Steer, WRI president, and CEO. “But only three percent of the public funding for mitigation goes to land and forest issues – that needs to change.”
Beyond climate, the last forest frontiers play a critical role in maintaining biodiversity, weather stability, clean air, and water quality. Some 500 million people worldwide depend directly on forests for their livelihoods.
A future without intact forests?
So-called intact forest landscapes – which can include wetlands and natural grass pastures – are defined as areas of at least 500 square kilometers with no visible evidence in satellite images of large-scale human use.
That means no roads, industrial agriculture, mines, railways, canals or transmission lines.
As of January 2017, there were about 11.6 million square kilometers of forests worldwide that still fit these criteria. From 2014 to 2016, that area declined by more than 87,000 square kilometers each year.
“Many countries may lose all their forest wildlands in the next 15 to 20 years,” Peter Potapov, an associate professor at the University of Maryland and lead scientist for the research, said.
On current trends, intact forests will disappear by 2030 in Paraguay, Laos, and Equatorial Guinea, and by 2040 in Cambodia, the Central African Republic, Nicaragua, Myanmar, and Angola.
“There could come a point in the future where no areas in the world qualify as ‘intact’ anymore,” said Tom Evans, director for forest conservation and climate mitigation at the Wildlife Conservation Society.
“It is certainly worrying.”
In tropical countries, the main causes of virgin forest loss are conversion to agriculture and logging. In Canada and the United States, fire is the main culprit, while in Russia and Australia, the destruction has been driven by fires, mining, and energy extraction.
Compared to annual declines during the period 2000-2013, Russia lost, on average, 90 percent more each year from 2014 to 2016. For Indonesia, the increase was 62 percent, and for Brazil, it was 16 percent.
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Protected areas
The new results are based on a worldwide analysis of satellite imagery, built on a study first done in 2008 and repeated in 2013.
“The high-resolution data, like the one collected by the Landsat program, allows us to detect human-caused alteration and fragmentation of forest wildlands,” Potapov said.
Presented at the Intact Forests in the 21st Century conference at Oxford University, the finding will be submitted for peer-reviewed publication, said Potapov, who delivered a keynote to the three-day gathering.
Addressing colleagues from around the world, Potapov also challenged the effectiveness of a global voluntary certification system.
Set up in 1994 and backed by green groups such as the World Wildlife Fund, the self-stated mission of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is to “promote environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests”.
Many forest-products carry the FSC label, designed to reassure eco-conscious consumers.
But approximately half of all intact forest landscapes inside FSC-certified concessions were lost from 2000 to 2016 in Gabon and the Republic of Congo, the new data showed. In Cameroon, about 90 percent of FSC-monitored forest wildlands disappeared.
“FSC is an effective mechanism to fragment and degrade remaining intact forest landscapes, not a tool for their protection,” Potapov said.
National and regional parks have helped to slow the rate of decline.
The chances of forest loss were found to be three times higher outside protected areas than inside them, the researchers reported.
Source Link: https://www.phnompenhpost.com/international/future-without-intact-forests
Cambodia’s military crackdown recalls bloody ‘Kratie insurrection’
Cambodia’s military crackdown recalls bloody ‘Kratie insurrection’ By: Paul Millar and Leng Len – Photography by…
Policemen, protesters hurt in Cambodian land dispute
Policemen, protesters hurt in Cambodian land dispute
Cambodia tops region for fires detected from space
Cambodia tops region for fires detected from space
Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon | Publication date 06 March 2018 | 11:06 ICT
Yet again, the Kingdom this year burns brighter than its neighbors, with fires in Cambodia being detected from space at a much higher rate than any other country in the region, according to a NASA report published last week.
It’s likely a product of both naturally occurring blazes and also those caused by land clearing, especially on concessions.
Fire season, which runs from January through March, but can extend as late as May, reached its 2018 peak on February 3, when NASA’s Earth Observatory picked up some 1,868 active fires in Cambodia. That compared to 217 in Thailand, 185 in Laos, 114 in Vietnam and 77 in Myanmar.
“The pattern is consistent with recent years,” according to a brief report from the public outreach arm of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “[T]he instrument has detected four-to-five times as many fires in northern Cambodia as it did in Vietnam and Thailand between August 2016 and February 2018.”
Chea Sam Ang, head of the Environment Ministry’s General Directorate for Administration of Nature Conservation and Protection, said annual fires in deciduous forests are a natural occurrence, burning surface debris, and grasslands, but leaving large trees unharmed. Simon Mahood, Wildlife Conservation Society–Cambodia senior technical adviser, agreed a portion of the burning is a natural part of the ecology.
“Cambodia has more [deciduous] forest than its neighbors. For a start, that’s definitely a factor,” he said. “The vast majority of fires are set by people.”
While many fires are from slash-and-burn agriculture, hunting, foraging and resin collection, as well as land grabbing, land clearing on concessions is the key factor, Sam Ang said.
“From the land concessions, when they clear the land they clear the forest for agriculture so after they collect the timber, they set the fire,” he said. “We have more [fires] because of land clearing for the [economic] land concessions and social land concessions.”
There is also a correlation between logging and forest fires, according to NASA’s report.
“Loggers use fire to clear roads and to clear the land after harvesting the most desirable species,” they wrote, noting that without information on the ground it is impossible to determine what caused a given fire from the satellite imagery.
This wouldn’t be the case in evergreen forests – such as in Virachey National Park – where hardly any fires are observed, Sam Ang and Mahood said.
Sam Ang added that fires are “not a priority” issue, though the ministry monitors and works with local villagers on fire education.
Graph of fire detections in Cambodia by Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite over time. Courtesy of NASA, The Earth Observatory