Posted on April, 01 2000

Godalming, UK: The land is verdant, the vegetation lush. Water is plentiful and forests stretch for as far as the eye can see. Cattle graze peacefully here and there, and water buffalo amble along a dusty track towards seemingly endless rice fields glimmering in the morning sun. Somewhere nearby, the laughter of children drifts on the still morning air. In this tranquil setting, all is well with the world.

It was not always so - because this is Cambodia. A quarter of a century ago, vast tracts of its land were carpet-bombed by a far-away country waging a war next door in Vietnam; then came the unspeakable genocidal horrors of the Pol Pot regime, when as many as two million people were either murdered or died from exhaustion, disease, torture or starvation.

It was only two years ago that civil strife was finally set aside. Now, for the first time in decades, this democratic kingdom is at peace. And it shows. In villages and towns throughout the country, people have an insatiable desire to learn English. Access to the internet is freely available in major cities. Many parts of Phnom Penh and Siam Reap are now little more than building sites, as hotels and office blocks appear almost overnight. After years of international isolation, Cambodia wants to be a part of the open, modern world. There's a lot of catching up to be done.

Amid this re-emergence of a nation, WWF is quietly at work. In a remote part of the northeast, three days' travel from the capital Phnom Penh, WWF is acting with local communities and the regional government on a number of projects that include National Park management and a series of training courses in tiger survey methodologies and assessments. In Phnom Penh itself, WWF cooperates with the national government on issues such as wildlife trade laws and protected area management legislation.

Much of WWF's work is in the Virachey National Park, near the borders with Laos and Vietnam. This is one of the largest relatively intact areas of natural forest in mainland Southeast Asia containing important watersheds and an array of wildlife, some of which is almost certainly undiscovered. With WWF's support, the government has set up a series of ranger stations there, and has equipped and trained 35 park guards. Jack Hurd is WWF's conservation programme manager in Cambodia. "Some 15,000 people live around the National Park" he says, "so we and other NGOs are working to make sure that their communities aren't marginalised by external forces such as logging interests. Long-term and sustained benefits from natural resources will only be gained if the various stakeholders - from the government itself to people working in the fields - have the knowledge and skills to plan, implement and evaluate their activities in relation to their natural environment. WWF is here to help that happen."

He is justifiably proud that a recent WWF tiger survey and field study have been conducted by Cambodian rangers for the first time. "We used camera-trapping methods and we're hoping to gather a lot of important information from them" he said. "It's true to say that we don't even know how many tigers there are in this part of Cambodia, but these studies will help provide the answer which is of international significance."

The national government, Jack Hurd says, is beginning to take the environment seriously - "there are, for example, 23 national protected areas in Cambodia covering three million hectares, including seven National Parks. But despite these good intentions, law enforcement is weak. Wildlife smuggling into Vietnam is a huge problem and a sensitive issue, for example, and despite the fact that logging without a licence is illegal, it's pretty rampant. The laws are in place, but implementation is weak. So it's a good time to push for improvements."

As far as the future is concerned, there is plenty in Cambodia to keep WWF occupied. "A great deal of countryside and forest has never been surveyed with any scientific understanding" Jack Hurd explains. "Human development is all-important so we want to enable local people to build their skills in research, data collection and analysis, and natural resource management techniques. We want to conduct more wildlife surveys, too, because we have a limited understanding of the biodiversity. The discovery of the sao la and the giant muntjac in Vietnam a few years ago made headlines around the world. Here in Cambodia, the kouprey (the country's national animal that looks similar to a large water buffalo) hasn't been seen for 30 years. It's believed to be extinct - but imagine if our survey found one..."

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*Peter Denton is Head of Publications at WWF-UK based in Godalming, UK.