Title
The legal loss of protected areas: A comparison from Eastern Cambodia.
Author(s)
Nuttall, Matthew; Vises, Ung; Diment, Alex
Published
2014
Abstract
Protected areas have long been seen as the bastions of conservation, where law enforcement rangers target illegal activities occurring within the protected area boundaries. The protected forests of Indochina are under ever increasing pressure from a plethora of threats, and often park managers and their law enforcement teams find themselve overwhelmed an under-resourced. Recently however, data on the legal loss of protected land through government sanctioned downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement has been collated globally, and the scale of these phenomena has come to light. Since 1992 Cambodia has designated approximately 24% of its land area to biodiversity conservation, in the form of protected areas, protected forests, and wildlife sanctuaries. The protected areas of Cambodia face the same pressures from illegal activities as the rest of Indochina, yet in recent years the frequency of events resulting in the legally sanctioned reallocation or loss of protected area land has risen steadily. We present a case stud from Eastern Cambodia that investigates the extent of lega land-use chang within two contiguous protected areas; Snuol Wildlife Sanctuary (SWS) and Seima Protected Forest (SPF). Analysis was conducted using both publicly available government documents nd sub-decrees, and remote sensing techniques. This allowed for the legal re-designation of land within protected areas that resulted in land-use change to be quantified.The difficulty in aligning sustainable natural resource management with rapidly expanding economies is the greatest challenge facing governments and conservationists in South East Asia. Our results clearly highlight the difference in resilience to economic pressures of the two protected areas, and highlight the current challenges being faced by governments and protected area managers to balance the need for economic development, often through lucrative agri-industrial investments, with conservation of natural resources and the preservation of protected areas.
Keywords
Protected area; PADDD; Law
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