CARDAMOM LANDSCAPE MANAGEMENT TO SUSTAIN BIODIVERSITY AND ECONOMIC RETURNS IN CAMBODIA A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY SUN HEAN IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Stephen Polasky and Dr. James D. L. Smith June 2014 © Sun Hean 2014 Acknowledgements I am grateful to all individuals and organizations that contributed to make this research a success. I express gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Stephen Polasky, and my co- advisor, Dr. James L.D. Smith, for their invaluable supervision and guidance throughout my graduate program. I also thank my committee members, Drs. Dean A. Current and Jay S. Coggins, for their invaluable advice, suggestions, and insightful criticisms of this manuscript. I would also like to thank the Wildlife Alliance and the University of Minnesota for contributing the necessary scholarships, cooperation, and arrangements to facilitate my program. I am indebted to the Royal Government of Cambodia for the permission to enroll in the University of Minnesota Conservation Biology Graduate Program. I express my sincere thanks to H.E. Chan Sarun, Minister of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries for government support, advice, and permission to use data to conduct my research. My special thanks to Wildlife Alliance Staff who helped me on field data collection and Eric Nelson, Andrew C. Jenks, and Ryan R. Noe for their kind advice and helpful suggestions on data analysis. Thanks also to Carah Kucharski for her valuable suggestions on this writing and friends and colleagues at the Conservation Biology Program as well as those in Polasky’s Lab for their comments and encouragement for me to pursue my study. I would also like to deeply thank Mr. Sotheary Duong, his wife, and Mrs. Lar Mundstock and her husband for their kind encouragement, motivation, support, and hospitality to let me stay with them for the last three years. Without their support, I would have had a financial burden and would not make today happen. Finally, I would like to especially thank my parents, other family members, my children, Kevin, Daradath, and Alisa for their spiritual support, love, and being there for me. I would like to dedicate this dissertation to them and pray that they will get the best education as they can from what the world has to offer them. Sun Hean i Abstract Today, there are few large landscapes that remain to support biodiversity. Their preservation is especially difficult in developing countries, where population growth is high and there is a great demand for land for increased production. The Cardamom landscape in Cambodia is one place where ecosystem preservation has become a national concern. Stakeholders have argued over the management of the landscape that features intact natural forest, valuable biodiversity, and ecosystem services. The private sector, along with several government agencies, is pushing for industrial development. Donor communities and none-governmental organizations want preservation. Finally, several government agencies such as the Ministry of Environment prefer to balance the two different interests. However, the most important question to ask is how we should develop this important landscape in an environmentally sound and economically efficient manner. To answer this question, I created three landscape management scenarios: strong development, strong conservation, and mixed conservation and development based on current government policy, development pressure, and donor community and NGO’s arguments. I used GIS, InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs), and other models, to evaluate monetary values of carbon sequestration, biodiversity, hydropower, and agriculture returns under each scenario and compared the returns across scenarios. Changes in elephant population and revenue from four ecotourism projects were used to convert biodiversity habitat scores into monetary values. I found that the strong conservation scenario provided the greatest economic return and at the same time sustained biodiversity in the landscape. Carbon sequestration was the most influential ecosystem service with a large difference in monetary returns between the conservation scenario and the development scenario. The results of this dissertation provide support for recommending that the Cambodian government should strongly protect the Cardamom landscape instead of managing it in other directions. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... i Abstract ........................................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents ........................................................................................................... iii List of Tables ................................................................................................................. vi List of Figures ............................................................................................................... vii List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................... viii Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Conservation and Development in the Cardamom Landscape: History and Current Context ............................................................................................... 4 1.1- Introduction ............................................................................................................. 5 1.1.1- Geological and Climatic Information ............................................................... 5 1.1.2- Biodiversity Status .......................................................................................... 10 1.1.3- Ecosystem Functions, Goods, and Services ................................................... 13 1.1.4- Social and Economic Information .................................................................. 16 1.1.5- Impacts/Threats .............................................................................................. 16 1.2- Key Institutions, Policies, and Regulations ........................................................... 17 1.2.1- Management Institutions of the Cardamom Landscape ................................. 18 1.2.2- Policies and Regulations related to the Cardamom Landscape ...................... 21 1.3- Conservation Status and Mechanism ..................................................................... 36 1.3.1- International Instruments and Royal Government of Cambodia Obligations 36 1.3.2- Conservation Areas ......................................................................................... 43 1.3.3- Conservation Mechanisms ................................................................................ 51 1.4- Development Status ............................................................................................... 56 1.4.1- Special Economic Zone (SEZ) ....................................................................... 56 1.4.2- Mining Concessions ....................................................................................... 57 1.4.3- Economic Land Concessions (ELCs) ............................................................. 58 1.4.4- Social land concessions .................................................................................. 59 1.4.5- Hydropower Development ............................................................................. 59 1.4.6- Irrigation Development ................................................................................... 62 1.4.7- Infrastructure Development ............................................................................ 62 1.4.8- Urbanization ................................................................................................... 63 iii 1.4.9- Community Development ............................................................................... 64 Chapter 2: Land Management Planning in the Cardamom Landscape: Implications for Biodiversity Conservation and Economic Development ............................... 65 2.1- Introduction ........................................................................................................... 66 2.2- Methods ................................................................................................................. 67 2.2.1- Formal statement of the problem .................................................................... 67 2.2.2- Threat mapping ............................................................................................... 67 2.2.3- Defining Land Use Land Cover Scenarios ..................................................... 68 2.2.4- Description of InVEST model ........................................................................ 70 2.2.5- Modeling Ecosystem Services ........................................................................ 71 2.2.5.1- Carbon sequestration ............................................................................... 71 2.2.5.2- Biodiversity ............................................................................................. 72 2.2.5.3- Water Yield.............................................................................................. 76 2.2.5.4- Water Scarcity ........................................................................................