Casinos, condos and sugar cane: How a Cambodian national park is being sold down the river
by James Fair on 4 May 2021

Botum Sakor National Park in southern Cambodia has lost at least 30,000 hectares of forest over the past three decades.
Decades of environmental degradation go back to the late 1990s when the Cambodian government began handing out economic land concessions for the development of commercial plantations and tourist infrastructure.
NGOs in Cambodia are said to be unwilling to speak out against the destruction of Botum Sakor because they are afraid they will not be allowed to operate in the country if they do.
The government says economic activity is vital to improve people’s livelihoods and reduce poverty.

Covering a vast peninsula that juts out into the Gulf of Thailand on Cambodia’s southern coast, Botum Sakor is one of the largest national parks in the country and known to be richly diverse in both fauna and flora.

It’s home to more than 500 bird and at least 44 mammal species, including Sunda pangolins, dholes (Cuon alpinus, a wild canid), Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) and pileated gibbons (Hylobates pileatus), all of which are classified as either Critically Endangered (Sunda pangolin) or Endangered in the IUCN Red List.

Over the past two decades, however, Botum Sakor has acquired a darker reputation for having one of the highest rates of deforestation in Cambodia, with those who are prepared to go on the record describing it as a “paper park” that is being effectively destroyed.

The park itself covers an expanse of just over 170,000 hectares (420,00 acres), but large areas have already been deforested. Satellite data from the University of Maryland (UMD) visualized on the forest monitoring platform Global Forest Watch (GFW) show that it lost 24,500 hectares of humid primary rainforest between 2002 and 2020. In other words, 24% of the park’s old growth forest was cleared over the past 18 years. Total tree cover loss (which adds in secondary forest loss) is even higher, equating to more than 32,000 hectares cleared.

Deforestation within the park appears to have peaked in 2012 with the loss of more than 3,000 hectares of primary forest that year alone, and then subsided to lower levels during most of the past decade. In 2019 and 2020, deforestation increased again, to 2,230 and 1,450 hectares lost respectively each year.
Full article: https://news.mongabay.com/2021/05/casin ... the-river/

It appears only china is to blame for this..
The 99 year lease is nearly ten years old.
Blaming other countries is pure spite...hatred of the US is easy but in this case not warranted.
china is going ruin everything they touch.
The entire coast is on the verge of eco-ruin.
Kampot to Kep is next.
Bokor...
Damn shame.

Coal-powered developments threaten Cambodia’s largest national park
Within a protected area covered by a patchwork of plantations, Cambodian officials are making space for yet another industrial zone, and a new coal-fired power plant
Danielle Keeton-Olsen
June 1, 2021

(Graphic: Danielle Keeton-Olsen / China Dialogue)
Cambodia’s government has granted permission for a new special economic zone (SEZ) and coal-fired power plant within the lush Botum Sakor National Park in coastal Koh Kong province. The SEZ would create another loosely regulated industrial area within a biodiverse primary forest.

Late last year, Koh Kong officials announced a pending deal for the SEZ of over 100 square kilometres with one of Cambodia’s biggest conglomerates, Royal Group.

The group had earlier announced its plans for the 700 MW coal power plant in the national park, in collaboration with Sinosteel, promising to sell 80% of its energy to the state electricity utility. Chinese corporations have been connected to several of Cambodia’s against-the-grain efforts to embrace coal power.

Royal Group received 168.8 hectares for the Botum Sakor power plant, but the SEZ’s location has yet to be set. According to the provincial government, the group was considering land within Botum Sakor district’s southern communes, Ta Nuon and Thma Sar.

The Botum Sakor Special Economic Zone was registered as a company in September, though Kheik Sie, one of the two registered directors, claimed he was not part of Royal Group nor partnering with the conglomerate.

Kheik Sie told China Dialogue it was too soon to say what kind of companies would operate in the zone, as they were still discussing what area his SEZ company would occupy: “If the people [nearby] know we’re looking at the land, we cannot buy.”
Royal Group have not responded to requests for comment.

Special status

Firms that wish to develop an SEZ in Cambodia must have a minimum US$500,000 in fixed assets and be willing to invest in infrastructure in their land grant. Companies described this as a challenge. In return, the Cambodian government will supply a “one-stop service office”, or an official placed locally at an SEZ for instant customs approval and other bureaucratic matters, at the company’s expense.

The Botum Sakor Special Economic Zone would not be the first of its kind within the national park. In 2008, the government granted Cambodian tycoon and politician Ly Yong Phat a 2,200-hectare SEZ, known as the Koh Kong SEZ.
More here: https://chinadialogue.net/en/nature/coa ... onal-park/

Long read:
How a ‘dirty gambling company’ may have set the standard for habitat destruction in Cambodia
by Gerald Flynn & Andy Ball on 8 February 2022

Union Development Group (UDG) is a Chinese state-owned enterprise that was granted a 36,000-hectare concession in Cambodia’s Botum Sakor National Park in 2008, followed by an additional 9,100-hectare concession granted in 2011. Much of Botum Sakor National Park’s forests have been cleared by UDG and other companies.
On Sep. 15, 2020, the United States Treasury Department, sanctioned UDG for “serious human rights abuses and corruption,” noting that UDG had enlisted the support of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces to evict and harass residents, and also managed to skirt the 10,000-hectare limit on land concessions by “falsely registering as a Cambodian-owned entity.”
In 2021, the Cambodian government signed into law Sub-decree No. 30, which transformed some 127,000 hectares of protected land in Koh Kong province into state-private land.
Conservationists, researchers and local residents interviewed by Mongabay worry that the sub-decree will mean that many other parts of Koh Kong province will follow in the destruction of Botum Sakor.

This is the first article in a three-part series. Read Part Two and Part Three.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — “I was detained for a night, the authorities had come to tear down another house, so I went to help, but ended up getting arrested instead,” said Phal Seat, a 47-year-old resident in Koh Kong province’s Botum Sakor district. “Before, we lived near the sea, we had a livelihood there, but we were made to move for UDG’s [Union Development Group] concession. They made us move here, by this road, but now they won’t give us land titles.”

Seat lost his 5-hectare plot of land, as did the estimated 1,000 families locked in an ongoing land dispute with UDG—a Chinese state-owned enterprise—that was granted a 36,000-hectare concession in Botum Sakor National Park in 2008, followed by an additional 9,100-hectare concession granted in 2011. The $3.8 billion investment is set to consume roughly 20 percent of Cambodia’s coast, which had previously provided Seat and other Cambodians with fish, crabs and snails.

“Nobody comes to intervene, no-one can solve our problems—these days I feel like I see a lot of injustice, we cannot build houses here because we don’t have land titles, we cannot farm because we don’t have land titles and we cannot have land titles because the local authorities won’t give them to us,” Seat said.

Seat said authorities even dismantled a well that he and the other villagers had built to provide clean drinking water. In October 2021, the Koh Kong Provincial Administration announced it would be holding a lottery to provide solutions for the victims of UDG.

On Sep. 15, 2020, the United States Treasury Department sanctioned UDG for “serious human rights abuses and corruption,” noting how UDG had enlisted the support of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces to evict and harass residents, and also managed to skirt the 10,000-hectare limit on land concessions by “falsely registering as a Cambodian-owned entity.”

But as the land dispute racks up a human cost and the environmental impact of UDG’s concession has seen much of the coast decimated, a new threat has come to the fore, one that stands to replicate the destruction of Botum Sakor in more of Koh Kong’s national parks, reserves and wildlife sanctuaries.

Signed into law in March 2021 by Prime Minister HE in his 36th year in power, Sub-decree No. 30 transformed some 127,000 hectares of protected land in Koh Kong province into state-private land, ostensibly with the view to providing land titles to communities like Seat’s. However, a Mongabay investigation found that a cabal of land brokers with links to Defense Minister Tea Banh and his brother Tea Vinh, who heads the Royal Cambodian Navy, were buying up vast swathes of land listed in Sub-decree No. 30.

This was grim vindication for conservationists who feared that the sub-decree would see Cambodia’s protected areas, which span some 7 million hectares nationally, serve as a land bank for the rich and powerful who they say have long exploited the country’s protected area scheme for their own benefit.

Mongabay
Botum Sakor National Park lost more than 30,000 hectares of land to Sub-decree No. 30—equivalent to roughly 18% of its total land mass. Yet, more of the park has been destroyed, cleared or otherwise degraded by UDG, with 26.34% of Botum Sakor consumed by UDG’s concessions, according to satellite data from the University of Maryland. Tree cover has already been reduced by 15.59% across both concessions since 2008, when UDG’s first concession was granted, but research published this year suggests that UDG’s destruction of Botum Sakor is set to ramp up with the development of more resort accommodation, casinos, shopping malls, entertainment centers, as well as industrial and commercial zones all slated for UDG’s concessions.

Mongabay reporters attempted to reach UDG through contact details listed on Ministry of Commerce records, and a response came from a former employee of UDG who said they no longer worked for the company.

" I don’t want to have any connections with this dirty gambling company,” said the person responding through the only email address listed for UDG in public Cambodian records. As such, UDG could not be reached for comment.

Now conservationists fear the sub-decree will see more of Koh Kong’s best-preserved landscapes follow the bleak trajectory of Botum Sakor, with privatization threatening to fracture one of the largest and wildest ecosystems in Cambodia.

Roughly 90% of Koh Kong was listed as protected prior to Sub-decree No. 30 due to the contiguous nature of its landscapes that saw mountains, rainforests, mangroves and seagrass trace a vast and varied range of habitats for some of Cambodia’s last remaining endangered species across the province and along its coast.

One key element of UDG’s developments along the Cambodian coast has been tourism. But while Koh Kong plays host to a range of ecotourism initiatives that aim to promote the natural beauty of the province, UDG’s mega-resorts have seen mangroves eviscerated, the coastline disfigured and land cleared for a string of roads.

The rest of the article: https://news.mongabay.com/2022/02/how-a ... -cambodia/