Restoring 1,000 Hectares in the Cardamom Mountain Rainforest in Cambodia

Restoring 1,000 Hectares in the Cardamom Mountain Rainforest in Cambodia

Partner: Wildlife Alliance
Years: 2024-2028

This project is located in the eastern portion of Phnom Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary, in the Cardamom Rainforest, Cambodia. This region is known by the locals as Chhay Voirpen, and the land there is extremely valuable, which has led to an increase in deforestation over the past decade. This new initiative plans to reforest 1,065 hectares in Chhay Voirpen.

Wildlife Alliance is a field-based landscape conservation NGO working for the protection of forests and wildlife in the Cardamom Rainforest landscape, in South Western Cambodia. WA also currently operates the largest tree nursery in Cambodia, the “Million Tree Nursery”, and has a proven track record of implementing large scale reforestation projects (800+ hectares of tropical rainforest reforested since 2010).
WA has been a Fondation Franklinia’s grantee since 2019, for their Cardamom Forest Protection Program, a network of seventeen forest ranger stations across the Cardamom Landscape dedicated to combating natural resource crime.
The reforestation area at Chhay Voirpen encompasses 1,065 hectares along the eastern bank of the Atay Hydropower Reservoir, and is part of a larger complex of unfragmented forest, primarily Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary. 23 threatened tree species have been recorded in the Cardamoms and Wildelife Alliance will try and propagate all of them, plus a range of non-threatened species, in the Million Tree Nursery, to be ultimately planted in situ.