Sustainable tourism in the Srepok Wilderness Area, Cambodia

A serious decline in species populations in the last few decades due to unsustainable harvesting and habitat loss has prompted urgent action from the Government, WWF, and other local partners to address this trend. These groups, along with IIED, have identified high-value low-impact wildlife ecotourism as a means of securing the future of these species and their ecosystem through generating financing for conservation activities and supporting local livelihoods as well as ensuring the financial sustainability of the protected area.

The project was designed under the premise that the local communities that are dependent on the use of natural resources within the Srepok Wilderness Area (SWA) are some of Cambodia’s poorest. Also, these communities represent the best chance for genuine conservation of key species within the SWA – they know the species, the area and their own poverty reduction needs.

Communities are unwittingly part of the problem; over-harvesting species and degrading the ecosystem within the SWA so that key species cannot persist. Therefore, the project aims to build awareness, and to create the environment necessary to make sure that costs of avoiding harvesting and other environmentally damaging activities are at least balanced with the benefits received from other sources.

The original Darwin Initiative-funded project successfully piloted community-based monitoring in the 3,500km2 SWA SWA. Its success led to calls from the Cambodian government and NGOs for replication in other Protected Areas. Work is now building on the project's initial success to scale up work in SWA and expanding activities into the Eastern Plains Landscape (EPL) of protected areas and biodiversity corridors. This is as part of an ecosystem approach that aims to safeguard 15,000km2 of globally important tropical dry forest habitat in Cambodia.

One unequivocal success was a Management-Oriented Monitoring System (MOMS) pilot led by community rangers in SWA which clearly shows potential replicability throughout the region. The next step is to train community-monitoring teams across EPL to conduct MOMS independently as a means of building stronger support for conservation activities.

Further, this project will expand capacity-building by the provincial Wildlife Ecotourism Management Board (WEMB). It will also develop a community tourism homestay initiative and environmental awareness and education activities. All of these activities begun under the first DI grant, but need extra momentum to expand to the landscape level.