One of Cambodia’s largest protected areas, Botum Sakor National Park, continues to lose tree cover, recent satellite data show. Officially designated as a national park in 1993, Botum Sakor initially covered more than 182,000 hectares (450,000 acres) of evergreen, semi-evergreen and mangrove forests. Older surveys from the 1990s and 2000s show that the park was historically home to numerous wildlife, including the critically endangered Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica), and the pileated gibbon (Hylobates pileatus). Today, Botum Sakor National Park (BSNP) is a whisper of the expansive old-growth forest it once was. From 2002 to 2023, the national park lost 30% of humid primary forest within the park’s originally designated limits, according to the Global Forest Watch (GFW) monitoring platform. Much of the clearing has been a result of the Cambodian government handing off parcels of BSNP to tycoons closely aligned with the longtime ruling party, Mongabay has previously reported. On these concessions, the government has permitted a range of development activities, from commercial crop plantations like acacia and oil palm to hotels and infrastructure for tourism and energy projects. The Cambodian government has privatized more than 158,000 hectares (390,000 acres) of the originally designated park as of August 2023. Recent preliminary satellite data on GFW show that between July and October 2024, there was further deforestation within the park’s boundaries, both within the concessions and inside the last remaining tracts of intact forest. Recent deforestation alerts from Botum Sakor National Park, Cambodia. For instance, GFW recorded recent deforestation within concessions granted to…This article was originally published on Mongabay
Article by:
This story first appeared on Mongabay
South Africa Today – Environment
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
