Project Description
Consultancy to Develop Community-Based Ecotourism Development in Protected Areas of the Cardamom Mountains-Tonle Sap Landscape
Client: Project Implementation Unit, Ministry of Environment (MoE), Kingdom of Cambodia and the World Bank (WB) | Partners: Joint Venture between ICEM Asia and Tony Charters and Associates | Duration: March 2022 – March 2025 | Location: Cambodia
Cambodia is home to rich cultural and natural resources and diverse ecosystems, putting it in an excellent position to offer ecotourism that attracts both international and domestic tourists. Growth of and support for this industry would generate valuable co-benefits, including stimulating economic development, creating jobs, reducing poverty and protecting the environment. [1] Critically, ecotourism can promote economic and social recovery from disruptions while also ensuring environmental sustainability and resilience of people and ecosystems. This is critical in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, where the tourism sector in Cambodia faced up to an 80% decrease in tourist arrivals in 2020, lost revenues of up to US$2.8 billion and had one million jobs affected.
The Cardamom Mountains-Tonle Sap (CMTS) landscape includes Southeast Asia’s largest freshwater lake and largest remaining rainforest. These unique habitats comprise complex wetlands, seasonally inundated forests, grasslands, floodplains, rainforest and montane ecosystems, which contain rich and irreplaceable biodiversity and support an estimated five million Cambodians with income, food and water. The area is also critical for climate resilience in Cambodia as CMTS forests regulate water flows, mitigate flooding, and reduce erosion that leads to sediment loading in rivers and the Tonle Sap.
The Cardamom Mountains is one of the last great wilderness regions of mainland Southeast Asia, blanketing much of Southwest Cambodia in rainforest. An impressive 62% of the Cardamom Mountains is designated as Protected Areas (PA), with around 70% remaining forest cover, making it the largest area of virgin forest remaining in Cambodia today.[2]
Aiming to tap into the ecotourism market, the Royal Government of Cambodia approved a draft national policy on ecotourism in 2018 and is developing a strategic plan to guide ecotourism development, including the creation of ecotourism circuits or corridors to link established tourism around Siem Reap and Phnom Penh to the CMTS.
Project objective:
The World Bank-funded Cambodia Sustainable Landscape and Ecotourism project aims to support ecotourism development in the CMTS-protected areas in ways that align with and are complementary to regional ecotourism destination plans. The project will also strengthen institutional arrangements for managing ecotourism development and establish Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFP) value chains to promote forest restoration while further supplementing rural incomes with a focus on women entrepreneurs. These outcomes can empower communities to play an active role in benefitting from the growing tourism industry and harnessing the potential of the NTFP value chains while ameliorating conflicts between biodiversity conservation and extractive economic development. From the outset, strong community participation in the project will be essential for ensuring sustainable outcomes and securing local solid ownership of the Community-based Ecotourism (CBET) products and services after project completion.
There are five main components to this project:
- Strengthen capacity for Protected Areas Landscape Planning and Management
- Strengthen opportunities for Ecotourism and NTFP Value Chains
- Improve access and connectivity
- Project management, coordination, monitoring and evaluation
- Contingent emergency response
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[1] World Bank. 2020. Enabling Ecotourism Development in Cambodia. Washington DC: World Bank.
[2] Ibid.
