Community-Based Ecotourism

Preservation of the Cardamom Mountains requires working in close partnership with the communities living in the region. Decades of instability have left many families hovering around the poverty line. In providing for their families, many have engaged in activities that put the region’s wildlife and forests at risk. Wildlife Alliance is working to enable local people to earn the income needed to provide for their families and to encourage communities to preserve the cultural and environmental heritage around them.

Increasingly, the international community is recognizing the Cardamoms as an ideal destination for ecotourism. The New York Times Travel Section had an article and slideshow on the region and Wildlife Alliance’s ecotourism work. The Koh Kong Conservation Corridor has been featured as one of the Top Ten Regions in Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2010 annual publication and in the Wall Street Journal. Lonely Planet has singled out Wildlife Alliance’s program in Chi Phat as the best community-based ecotourism destination in Cambodia, highlighting the increasing appeal of its locally run guesthouses, restaurants, and outdoor activities, and Wall Street Journal-Asia raves “poverty was the root cause of wildlife and forest loss in the Cardamoms … ecotourism offered the possibility both of alleviating poverty and leading villagers to see value in the nature surrounding them.”

Please visit our Community-Based Ecotourism site in Chi Phat to see the impact of our work firsthand.

In Chi Phat and Trapeang Rung, Wildlife Alliance and the community members are working together to develop sustainable ecotourism opportunities—providing jobs for former poachers and loggers who now cater to an ever increasing influx of foreign tourists. Villagers who once roamed the forest to deplete it of its environmental heritage are now employed to run trekking, mountain-biking and river boat tours.

Community members own, manage and work in restaurants, guesthouses and homestays catering to people visiting to see the wildlife, archeological sites, waterfalls and caves—giving local residents a stake in ensuring the long-term protection of the land.

Click here to learn how you can visit Chi Phat and support our sustainable ecotourism project.

Wildlife Alliance is a proud member of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council. We support the GSTC mission of mainstreaming sustainable tourism by increasing the reach of sustainable tourism practices to traditional large-scale operations and endorse the principles of the GSTC Criteria.

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