PHNOM PENH — A new report published by Human Rights Watch on Feb. 28 details a litany of alleged abuses in the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project, which covers a vast swath of rainforest across Cardamom National Park in southwest Cambodia. The 118-page report alleges that Wildlife Alliance, the conservation NGO that jointly manages the 465,000 hectares (1.15-million-acre) REDD+ project with the Ministry of Environment, didn’t secure the free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) of the largely Indigenous communities whose land was absorbed into the project to sell carbon credits. The rights watchdog detailed numerous accounts from community members who alleged being forcibly and violently evicted by Wildlife Alliance staff as well as the government rangers and military police officers accompanying the NGO’s staff on patrols. According to HRW, customary land rights were ignored and Wildlife Alliance didn’t implement a formal benefit-sharing contract with the communities affected by the REDD+ project. Prior to the report’s release, Wildlife Alliance published a roughly 10,000-word open letter on Dec. 21, 2023, countering the claims made by HRW and expressing concerns over how the report was produced, as well as accusing HRW of failing “to acknowledge and incorporate into their allegations a comprehensive view of the project’s full impacts, nor critical elements of project- and country-level context.” (Wildlife Alliance’s website was in “maintenance mode” when Mongabay published this story; a snapshot of its open letter was archived here on March 8.) This map shows the scale of Wildlife Alliance’s REDD+ projects across the Cardamom Mountains.…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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