Using Wildlife Ecotourism for Sustainable Resource Management in the Srepok Wilderness Area

Geographical location:

Asia/Pacific > Southeast Asia > Cambodia (Kampuchea)

Summary

This project will restore the once abundant populations of large mammals in the Srepok Wilderness Area, Northeast Cambodia. Wildlife will be restored through a combination of professional protected area management practices, community-based natural resource management and by developing ecotourism as a source of income for local communities. The results of this project will also provide invaluable lessons for the fledgling Cambodian ecotourism industry.

Background

Nature is a vital resource for Cambodia’s 13 million mostly rural people, some 38% of whom live below the poverty level. Over three-fourths of the protein consumed by Cambodians, for example, comes from fishing. This is supplemented by other activities including cattle raising, hunting, and harvesting of non-timber forest products.

Poverty among Cambodia’s rural population is accompanied by numerous development challenges, including extremely high illiteracy rates, high infant mortality, and disease. Approximately 80% of villages have no health care facilities at all, and the quality of the existing services is poor.

Adequate representation in decision-making is another difficulty for rural Cambodians. For example, women constitute 53% of the adult labour force in Cambodia - more than in any other Southeast Asian country - yet remain poorly represented at the political level.

Between 1999 and 2003 WWF identified the Mondulkiri Forest landscape as a high priority when the biodiversity of Northeastern Cambodia was comprehensively assessed. Subsequently, a project was developed to establish a zone that would protect the most important aspects of this landscape. This led to the establishment of the Srepok Wilderness Area (SWA) in 2003, covering more than 400,000 hectares.

WWF and its partners have added a strong community-based component to protected area management, and have gathered local information that is essential for protected area zoning within the SWA project site. Community support, among many other benefits, increases the chances for success in conserving biodiversity and broad habitat units within the landscape.

Ecotourism development could help to provide many of the answers to current problems related to conservation threats and local community needs in Cambodia. The potential for ecotourism is very high, especially in the relatively intact forests of the Cambodian Eastern Plains.

There is currently no well-established ecotourism industry in Cambodia; however, the Cambodian government has expressed a strong desire to support ecotourism as a means to strengthen conservation and to support sustainable economic development.
Therefore, the proposed project will contribute substantially to developing a framework for sustainable ecotourism development, with particular emphasis on establishing a replicable model for other potential sites in the country.

Objectives

- Improve natural resource management (NRM) through increased community participation in natural resource use decision-making and to ensure access and sharing oof the associated economic benefits.

- Initiate wildlife ecotourism activities in the Srepok Wilderness Area (SWA) and provide a model for the development of sustainable ecotourism activities elsewhere in Cambodia.

- Establish community-based monitoring of indicator species in order to track the progress of wildlife restoration and inform about natural resource management efforts.

Solution

At the completion of this project, three vital building blocks for the success of the broader SWA ecotourism initiative will be in place: mechanisms for community access to benefits, mechanisms for effective ecotourism management, and the means to manage and measure wildlife population status. These building blocks will be supported by the natural resource management (NRM) Sub-Committees within the Commune Councils, and the Ecotourism Management and Advisory Committee established by this project, ensuring local ownership and capacity to sustain progress on the long-term SWA initiative and even broader conservation and development goals into the future.

The pilot activities are meant to demonstrate the process of ecotourism business management and development to local communities. It is the intention that these demonstrations, combined with the increased community management and marketing capability, will provide the basis for the multiplication of ecotourism to a larger scale within the SWA and beyond.