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Last month, the Phnom Penh Post published a shocking article about the illegal logging of rosewood in the Central Cardamom Protected Forest in Cambodia. According to the article, the illegal logging is abetted by military personnel, while Conservation International, which is working with the Cambodian government to manage the protected area, denies that the trade is taking place.
REDD-Monitor is requesting your help to find the best REDD stories contained in the US Embassy Cables that WikiLeaks released last week. WikiLeaks started releasing edited versions of the cables in November 2010, since when the cables have been trickling out. On 31 August 2011, WikiLeaks released 251,287 US Embassy cables. Unredacted.
Earlier this week, around 300 members of the Prey Lang network gathered outside the Royal Palace in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh to pray for the protection of the Prey Lang forest – the largest area of intact lowland evergreen forest remaining in southeast Asia. The forest is under severe threat, particularly from a series of large-scale rubber concessions.
Interview with Andy White, Coordinator of the Rights and Resources Initiative, Washington DC, by email.
In this short video, “Lives of the Forest,” indigenous activists from the Asia Pacific region speak out against REDD. “We find that the way [the international community] took decisions for passing through this REDD mechanism is in complete exclusion of the indigenous peoples,” says Jiten Yumnam of the Meitei people in Manipur, India.
Benoît Bosquet, Coordinator of the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) at the World Bank, has responded to REDD-Monitor’s questions for Jürgen Blaser, a reviewer on the World Bank’s FCPF Technical Advisory Panel. Blaser had quoted REDD-Monitor in a presentation at the recent Participants Committee meeting in Vietnam, giving the impression that REDD-Monitor supported the REDD readiness process in Cambodia.
Jürgen Blaser is a reviewer on the World Bank’s FCPF Technical Advisory Panel. Last week, at a presentation during the eighth Participants Committee meeting in Vietnam, he used a quotation from an article on REDD-Monitor and presented it in a slide titled, “Overall Summary: Strengths of the RPP [Readiness Preparation Proposal].” REDD-Monitor would like to take this opportunity to put the record straight.
On 1 February 2011, Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, awarded two concessions covering a total area of 18,855 hectares for conversion to rubber plantations. No surprises there, then. Hun Sen’s government awards land concessions on an astonishingly regular basis. But these two concessions are perhaps a little more surprising because they are inside a national park.
“Forests under Threat,” was the title of a recent article in the Phnom Penh Post. It’s a good article, but the headline could have been this year’s entry for the Basil Fawlty Award for stating the bleeding obvious. Cambodia’s forests, what’s left of them after years of destructive logging (legal and illegal), industrial agrobusiness and mining concessions, are among the most threatened on the planet.
Last month I was invited to speak at a workshop titled, “Food, Livelihoods and Climate Change in the Mekong Region“. I was asked to give an introduction to REDD and an overview of some of the REDD projects and actors in the Mekong Region.
A recent study, “Forest transition in Vietnam and displacement of deforestation abroad,” found that while Vietnam’s area of forest is increasing, it is doing so at the expense of forests in other countries, including Laos, Cambodia and Indonesia. |
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