Strategies

Linking communities to conservation

WCS conducts awareness campaigns in villages bordering the Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area in Lao PDR to explain local communities’ rights to land and the laws that are in place to protect that access. Empowered with the new understanding of how they benefit from conservation, those communities have developed new local regulations for protected area management around their villages.

The population in and around the Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary, Eastern Plains, Cambodia grows by around 6% each year. Control of illegal settlement is a priority to safeguard the protected forest and the natural resources local people depend upon. WCS has supported indigenous land titling in and around the forest. This regulates the agricultural activities of local people and defines who can benefit from the area’s natural resources. Indigenous Community Committees convene regularly to decide on land issues. In O’rona Village the Indigenous Community Committees successfully took out a court injunction to stop an illegal land grab with WCS legal support. This was the first time that the courts had found in favor of an indigenous land title and creates an important precedent for ensuring indigenous people’s land rights are recognized. 

Find out more

• View the Cambodia Case Study 
• Read the 2017 ICT progress brief
• Watch the video on indigenous land tenure in Mondulkiri

When Saw Htoo Tha Po’s grandparents were alive, land throughout the Taninthayi Region, Myanmar was demarcated informally. Now through a formal land use planning process, different zones are formally identified, local people better understand the value of their own traditional resources, and the government and Karen National Union recognize traditional ownership of those lands.

WCS promotes government-supported, participatory, land-use planning as a critical step towards developing conservation management arrangements. Communities are responsible for defining different zones, including total protection and controlled use zones, areas for NTFP (Non-Timber Forest Products) collection and community fishing. Their involvement ensures community support for a protected area and reduces conflict between local people and government authorities.

Souen Savin earns a small amount of money to protect the nest of the rare Giant Ibis that she found close to her village in Cambodia. The bird nest protection scheme pays local people for their conservation efforts when they locate nests. They receive an additional bonus if chicks successfully hatch and leave the nest. In 2017, 78 local people from 18 villages near the protected areas of Cambodia’s Northern Plains were directly employed and trained to protect nests of threatened birds; 162 globally threatened bird nests were protected, fledging 291 chicks. At Prek Toal Core Area, 42 community members were paid to protect more than 30,000 nests per year.

Having learnt from the nest protection scheme in Cambodia, WCS Myanmar has now established a similar scheme in and around the Ayeyarwady River basin to protect the numerous globally threatened bird species there.

Find out more

• Download the Translinks Case Study: Bird Nest Protection Program in the Northern Plains of Cambodia report

Research has confirmed that conservation enterprises can both protect biodiversity and ecosystem services and alleviate local poverty. WCS has been measuring the impacts of payments for ecosystem services (PES) and conservation enterprise models for biodiversity, forests and poverty in Cambodia since 2002, and in Lao PDR since 2007. WCS is sharing lessons learned from these projects, resulting in the replication of successful models elsewhere in the region. Analysis has shown that making direct payments for conservation action to individuals is a fundamental element to setting up a conservation enterprise, while the social monitoring associated with the conservation enterprise makes it more sustainable over the longer term.

 

Find out more

• Read the Design, monitoring and evaluation of a direct payments approach for an ecotourism strategy to reduce illegal hunting and trade of wildlife in Lao PDR research paper
• Download 'Payments for biodiversity conservation in the context of weak institutions: Comparison of three programs from Cambodia' by Clements et al in

  Ecological Economics 69 (2010) 1283–1291.

  
  
  . 

The WCS Drivers Partnership has started community-led ecotourism enterprises in 46 villages, benefiting 40,000 people, in the Lower Mekong and Ayeyarwady River basins. The recent focus of the WCS Drivers Partnership has been to expand, deepen and replicate WCS’s flagship ecotourism enterprises in suitable locations in the region. Regional exchanges have allowed for other WCS country programs to learn from the established models at Tmatboey in Cambodia and Nam Et-Phou Louey in Lao PDR. As a result, new fledgling enterprises are now operational in the Ayeyarwady River delta and Taninthayi in Myanmar, and Keo Seima in Cambodia. The most established ecotourism enterprises are the Nam Nern Night Safari in Lao PDR and the Tmatboey Community Lodge in Cambodia.

Find out more

• Download the Ecotourism in Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area, Lao PDR brief 
• Download Nam Et-Phou Louey Ecotourism Stats and Visitor Profile 2010-2018
• Download the Translinks Case Study: Tmatboey Community-based Ecotourism Project, Cambodia report 

Choem Yadh is one of 28 female-head-of-household Ibis Rice farmers at Tmatboey village in Cambodia’s Northern Plains. Since the government recognized her local Community Protected Area and the different zones that it encompasses, she has gained official ownership over her home and rice fields. This has given her the economic security she needed to invest further in her rice-growing enterprise and a small cashew nut orchard. By participating in the Ibis Rice scheme, she has agreed to grow organic rice in accordance with a locally agreed land use plan that protects the surrounding forest. In return she is paid a premium for her produce.

As the WCS Mekong Drivers Partnership flagship conservation enterprise, the Ibis Rice scheme has 680 farming households across 12 villages participating. In one year, farmers produced and sold around 80 tonnes of Ibis Rice. With its strong focus on adding value to local Cambodian produce, the Ibis Rice brand is allowing local rice farmers to take their sought-after commodities to international export markets. On average, a household earns $765 from its sales of Organic Wildlife Friendly rice and style,315 from Organic rice to Ibis Rice. WCS is taking the lessons learned from Ibis Rice and translating them to other fledgling conservation enterprises in the Lower Mekong and Ayeyarwady River basins.

Mars Foods is committed to purchasing only sustainably grown rice by 2020. The Sustainable Rice Platform (SRP) sets the standards that it will expect its suppliers to adhere to. Applying the SRP standards to rice provides a solution for supporting farmers in the grasslands of Cambodia to add value to their rice in a way that allows Bengal Floricans and other grassland birds to continue to flourish alongside their human co-habitants.

Shade-grown coffee is three times as valuable on the international market as maize and does not require the felling of forest to grow it. In the highlands of Houaphan Province, Lao PDR, WCS is working with commercial partner Saffron Coffee to train interested local farmers on coffee production.

WCS has also trialed bamboo, growing fodder for pigs, non-timber forest products (NTFP) and small-scale agro-forestry. NTFP has shown potential but a lack of demand and access to market has limited the potential success of the other trials.