Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary REDD+ Project

Many villages in the Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary area are remote and travel to clinics can be very difficult – especially for the elderly or unwell – and some treatments can be prohibitively expensive. The project has invested in medical services for the local communities including medical clinics. In 2021, 500 residents in 5 indigenous villages in KSWS benefited from mobile clinics. The mobile health clinics were selected as high priority actions by the 5 participating villages (Pu Tang, Pu Keh, Gati, Pu Char and Pu Nhav), who funded the clinics with their REDD+ benefit sharing funds. Providing “free at the point of use” healthcare on-site in each village has significant positive impacts on the well-being of these communities, while also addressing an underlying driver of deforestation: medical debt.

The project supports new livelihood opportunities for >5800 people through a variety of initiatives including enforcement, eco-tourism and agriculture. For example, IBIS Rice is a Wildlife Conservation Society initiative, successfully connecting conservation outcomes with economic incentives. It provides communities motivation to engage in conservation, offering 1,500 wildlife-friendly farmers a premium for organic jasmine rice. Farmers commit to no logging, hunting, or pesticides, protecting the landscape and its species. The rice is sold globally at a higher premium and provides a win-win scenario for communities and conservation, helping to diminish poverty and reducing deforestation by 75% where IBIS Rice farmers work. In KSWS, the IBIS Rice program is currently active in 3 REDD+ villages: Pu Kong, Pu Char and Ou Chra, with a total of 79 farmer households having joined the program and 13 successfully selling to IBIS Rice already.

Women are being recognized and celebrated as leaders in KSWS through new livelihoods and leadership opportunities. The efforts to strengthen tenure rights and reduce landlessness is being led by a young Indigenous woman, Danh Salon from the Indigenous Community Land area of O Chra. Through her work, the project is supporting Indigenous communities to register their traditional land as well as protecting and conserving their natural resources. After taking on her new role, Salon brought her community together to discuss the risk of their communal land ownership and encouraged them to stay united in efforts to protect their community land from being grabbed through the land demarcation process.

Directly funding communities to implement their development activities is a core part of the KSWS REDD+ model. As of 2020, more than $400,000 had been provided to communities, who have used funds for clean water systems, mobile health clinics, school feeding programs, community meeting halls, repairing bridges and roads, and sanitation. Following successful sales in 2021 – with an 80-fold increase in sales between 2020-2021 – significantly more funds are becoming available to communities beginning in 2022, with plans being finalized with the communities on how best to utilize the funds.

Formal recognition of land rights is a crucial part of supporting communities to protect and maintain areas they have stewarded for generations. These ancestral forests are particularly important to the indigenous Bunong community for spiritual and burial purposes as well as for traditional botanical medicine and sustainable extraction of non-timber forest products. The deforestation frontier that is expanding in the region continues to add pressure to the southern area of the project zone. Without formal recognition of their land, communities are vulnerable to land grabbing and displacement. The project has partnered with the local Bunong community in an effort to formally secure land and resource tenure. So far, the project has helped the communities within the project area to secure seven Indigenous Community Land Titles, including the first one in Cambodia’s history. This effort is ultimately expected to provide land titles for approximately 2,000 Indigenous people within the project area.

The population of 11 key species in the Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary (KSWS) were monitored between 2010 — 2020 using line transects. The report shows that populations of green peafowl and pig-tailed macaque are increasing, that populations of black-shanked douc langur, yellow-cheeked crested gibbon, long-tailed macaque, and wild pig are stable, and that populations of Germain’s silvered langur, stump-tailed macaque, and all ungulates except wild pig are decreasing. More than 80% of species trends matched or improved on the anticipated trends set in 2010 in the REDD+ Project Document. These results highlight the success and impacts of the project, while spotlighting where new conservation interventions are most urgently needed.

Community Protected Areas (CPA) within the Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary are continuously improving the protection of their borders – including the installation of signboards marking their CPA boundary in order to improve management and to deter illegal encroachment and other crimes. The signboards serve to inform people of the CPA boundaries, detail prohibited activities, and explain the importance and the need to protect natural resources.