Communities living around Cambodia’s Tonle Sap are using a combination of natural and technological solutions to help protect the lake and its surrounding forests from fires.A community savings initiative funds patrol teams, which respond to satellite alerts and have stopped more than 50 wildfires.Local residents are also restoring the forest by growing native trees in community nurseries.Threatened wildlife are returning as a result of these efforts: the fishing cat has been spotted for the first time in 10 years in the restoration area.
“When the forest [is] healthy, fish can breed and grow. But if the forest burns, the fish disappear — and that affects the livelihoods of our whole community,” says Luon Chanleng, a fisher from Tonle Sap. “I can’t imagine our life without the forest.”
Tonle Sap in Cambodia is the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia. Each year, when the dry season sets in from around January to June, the waters of the flooded forest recede, the mangrove roots poke out through the mud, and the flooded forest turns into a tinder box.
More than a million people live around the lake and depend on it for their livelihoods, homes and nutrition. Yet, the freshwater mangroves or “flooded forest” that surround the lake are shrinking. A study by the Wonders of the Mekong project, led by the University of Nevada in the U.S., found that nearly a third of forests in flood plains like the Tonle Sap area were lost between 1993 and 2017.
