Qualla: Southern Cardamom National Park

Southern Cardamom National Park: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andyb3947, CC BY-SA 4.0. The park was designed around an absence. Tigers vanished from Cambodia in 2007, and when the government drew the boundaries of Southern Cardamom National Park nine years later, one of the stated purposes was to hold a forest large enough and safe enough that tigers could one day be brought back to it. That is an unusual thing to build: 4,104 square kilometres of protection for an animal that is not there, on the bet that the prey, the cover and the quiet can be assembled first and the predator added afterwards. Everything difficult about conservation in the Cardamom Mountains follows from that bet - what a forest is for, who it belongs to, and who pays to keep it standing.

Image: Andyb3947 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Southern Cardamom National Park: One Park, Made of Many

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andyb3947, CC BY-SA 4.0. Sub-decree 89 established the park on 9 May 2016, dividing it into Western, Central and Eastern sectors across the southern flank of the Cardamom range. Its real significance is not its own footprint but what it joins together. To the north lie Phnom Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary, Ce...

Image: Andyb3947 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Southern Cardamom National Park: Sixty Small Survivors

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andyb3947, CC BY-SA 4.0. In July 2024, sixty Siamese crocodiles hatched from five separate nests inside the park. For a reptile that has lost more than eighty percent of its global population since the 1940s, that number was extraordinary - the largest wild breeding record of the species this century. Si...

Image: Andyb3947 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Southern Cardamom National Park: Who Pays for a Forest

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andyb3947, CC BY-SA 4.0. Protection costs money, and the money came from carbon. The Southern Cardamom REDD+ project, run by Cambodia's Ministry of Environment with the conservation group Wildlife Alliance, began in January 2015 across roughly half a million hectares; Verra certified it in 2018, and mult...

Image: Andyb3947 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Southern Cardamom National Park: The Cost Nobody Counted

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andyb3947, CC BY-SA 4.0. Human Rights Watch published its findings in February 2024, after interviewing more than ninety people across twenty-three of the project's twenty-nine villages. The first community consultations, it found, did not take place until August 2017 - thirty-one months after the projec...

Image: Andyb3947 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Southern Cardamom National Park: What the Park Has Left to Prove

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andyb3947, CC BY-SA 4.0. Both things about this place are true at once. The forest is genuinely intact, the crocodiles genuinely hatched, and the corridor genuinely connects. And the households that lost their farmland to that outcome were among the poorest in one of the poorest provinces in Cambodia, as...

Image: Andyb3947 | CC BY-SA 4.0