Sub-decree No. 30 removed roughly 127,000 hectares from eight protected areas across Koh Kong province in a single stroke - an area about twice the footprint of Phnom Penh. Conservation science has a bloodless acronym for this kind of thing, PADDD, for protected area downgrading, downsizing and degazettement, and Cambodia produced one of the largest single instances anywhere that year. The official justification was that the land would be used to grant titles to communities already living inside the boundaries, which is a real problem with a real solution. But investigative reporting by Mongabay found that much of what came out of Tatai was uninhabited forest rather than settled village land, and that residents who did receive documents got soft titles carrying no formal legal ownership - paper that is easily overridden by anyone with more weight to throw.

What followed was, in Mongabay's account, a fire sale. Reporting on the aftermath named Defence Minister Tea Banh as having proposed the reduction and his brother, navy chief Tea Vinh, as coordinating sales; the tycoon Ly Yong Phat, known locally as the King of Koh Kong, acquired substantial parcels; the Chinese pulping firm Green Rich expanded its operations. Brokers took commissions of 30 to 40 percent and kept buyers and sellers from ever meeting each other. Meanwhile the pressures the sanctuary was created to resist carried on inside the lines that remained: sand dredging and processing along the waterways, water bodies filled in outright until Koh Kong authorities ordered a halt to the infilling of the sanctuary's canals, and land-grabbing at the edges. Part of Tatai also sits within the Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project, an attempt to fund forest protection by selling carbon credits.

In 2014 the China National Machinery Industry Corporation completed the 246-megawatt Stung Tatai hydropower dam, one of the largest generating stations in the country. Dams displace people twice: once from the reservoir, and then again wherever those people end up. Families moved off the flooded ground resettled into the protected area itself, which put households who had not chosen any of this on the wrong side of a boundary drawn for other reasons. The result is a familiar bind across the Cardamoms - communities told they are living illegally on land they were relocated to, while the parcels around them change hands among people who never lived there at all.

A camera trap caught the last confirmed Indochinese tiger in Cambodia in 2007. In 2016 the government declared the subspecies functionally extinct in the country - not a slow scientific fading but an announcement, in a place that had held tigers within living memory. Snaring is the mechanism: patrols have pulled well over 100,000 wire snares out of Cardamom protected areas, an indiscriminate harvest that empties a forest of the prey a big cat needs long before it takes the cat. In April 2023 India signed a memorandum of understanding with Cambodia to help bring tigers back, with a proposal to establish Bengal tigers from India in an initial enclosure of at least 90 acres of Cardamom rainforest. Whether reintroduction can work depends on whether the forest around the enclosure is still worth releasing an animal into. The same range holds Asian elephants, clouded leopards and some of the last Siamese crocodiles on Earth - and their answer to that question is arriving faster than the tigers are.