We actually did. But we had been accustomed to using the PassApp to book these local taxis. With the app, one is assured of what one exactly needs to pay as it automatically calculates the fare according to the destination’s distance. To flag down a rickshaw on the road requires negotiation skills. If one speaks Khmer, then there shouldn’t be a problem. But for those who don’t, an arbitrarily high fare can be expected.

We went to another corner and the same man slowly drove by us again. This time he was precise: Hire me. I need money. But by then our booked rickshaw had arrived. I could only softly whisper to the ether: Somtos, somtos (So sorry). 

That was in Cambodia—Battambang to be exact, where I stayed for almost two months. 

My trip to the Kingdom of Cambodia began in Taiwan. I journeyed to Taipei in July as one of three artists invited to be part of the Mekong Cultural Hub (MCH) Professional Exchange 2023. Thai performer Wasu Wanlayangkoon, schooled in Augusto Boal’s theater techniques and philosophy, and Myanmar documentary photographer and activist Ya Min Htet aka NuNu completed our triumvirate. On the occasions that she could join us on our walks, Ut Quyen, a historian and cultural worker from Vietnam who at that time worked for MCH, made us a quadrumvirate.

The exchange was designed to be a 90-day exploration. But for reasons I’ll never know, despite my delivering all the required documents, I was only issued a 30-day non-extendable visa by the Taiwan office in the Philippines. With no clear explanation to the restriction, I helplessly and grudgingly concluded that to be Filipino is to be saddled with remarkable prejudice and disadvantage. 

When I arrived in Taiwan, only the Southeast Asians understood why I also carried my old passports with me: “It’s only us who constantly have to prove our travel histories, huh?” The East Asians were perplexed by this.

Guided by Jennifer Lee and Frances Rudgard of MCH, I realized that being in Taiwan meant learning about the capacities of their art and cultural industry. Wasu, NuNu and I had limited time to study and observe the conditions of Taiwanese creative practitioners, but we became acutely aware from the beginning that they are able to source and receive financial support from their own government. Grants, for instance, include studio rent assistance, overseas tuition (sometimes payable in 10 years without interest), micro-funding of workshops, and many more. 

Even if Taiwanese friends asserted that they don’t always get awarded their desired budget or any form of sponsorship because of a variety of factors, the mere thought of having access to such funding opportunities struck us differently, given that we all come from places where local grants are hard to come by. To merely hear of the substantial allocation of resources to the art sector was an occasion for envy. 

I learned much from Art Site Hsinchu’s Lee Yu-hsuan. I had an art studio at the Art Site of Hsinchu Railway Warehouse. The city is where Taiwan’s soft power, its sleeping dragon, resides: semiconductors, telecommunications, and microchips. To be in Taiwan is to comprehend that technological progress is part of its brand.

The existence of strong health insurance for Taiwan’s people serves as another barometer: The local artists attest to it as one of the best in the world. I sigh as I think of the Philippines’ poor healthcare system, and the crowdfunding activities that Filipinos commonly resort to whenever friends (or even strangers) need help to cope with staggering medical bills.

There are other things I can list down that will make this seem like a love letter to Taiwan. Its clean(er) rivers and tributaries, shopping districts, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, and efficient public transport system that allows for dignity in commuting are stuff worth tearing up for. Even public bicycles from point to point can be accessed, and the crosswalks are literal “safe spaces” where pedestrians can walk and not expect to be harshly treated by arrogant motorists in their monster vehicles. I experienced the joy of peacefully walking alone at night while talking on my phone, not worried about theft, or harassment just for being female.

It was also easy to be awed by the existence of potable water dispensers in buildings at which everyone can refill their tumblers. The internet is one of the fastest worldwide. And while such things are ordinary for the Taiwanese, to be in Taiwan is to bear witness to the basic services being humanly available to its people. Misplacing a phone or wallet (or even a passport) isn’t a problem, as one is assured that lost things will be returned to their owner. Or so I was told.

Even so, all these potentialities and possibilities were tempered with discussions on the politics of not knowing Mandarin, the high cost of living coupled with the astronomical increase of real estate prices, and land and sea border controls. The latter wasn’t discussed much; attempts to open the topic were deflected or met with awkward (or careful) silence. To live in the heart of Taipei is to work hard to pay the rent, buy food and settle bills. Thus, artists choosing to move to more affordable locations outside the capital is considered a feasible life plan. 

To further scale down these impressive scenarios is to likewise bring up the issue of the homeless, as well as the ambivalent behavior towards migrant communities. Homeless Taiwanese do exist, and the spaces outside train stations are some of their temporary settlements. It’s a reality that the general population seems to avoid (“Nobody talks about the homeless here,” Ut Quyen muttered). 

It wasn’t always easy to spot beggars, but I noted one or two in high-traffic shopping areas prostrate in prayer while holding their begging cups. I observed that in order to survive the onslaught of economic inflation, and not have to beg, some elderly or PWDs do blue-collar work. In trying to assess the poverty rate (doubtless lesser compared to the numbers in other parts of Southeast Asia), I found an interesting oddity: The homeless that I saw surrounding the Taipei train station owned mobile phones. 

Beyond the strictly creative structures of art spaces, cafes, tourist spots, and art studios, Wasu, NuNu and I came to understand the migrant life from the library-slash-bookstore called Brilliant Time, a space that specializes in reading materials on Southeast Asia. 

A yearly project of Chang Cheng, a former journalist and the owner and founder of the space, is to publish an anthology of essays by migrants who are living or who have lived in Taiwan. These essays are the results of a writing contest, all written in each author’s mother tongue, which are then translated into Mandarin, and collected in a book. For Chang Cheng, to know about others through these writings is to pave a way for the Taiwanese to be more mindful and understanding of other cultures. 

We met the volunteers of Garden of Hope, a nongovernment organization that focuses on the needs of migrant workers. Given Taiwan’s growing foreign workforce, we learned about the laborers’ conditions as being anything but easy. In dire situations, contractual female laborers are fearful of becoming pregnant lest their work contracts be instantly terminated. Passive-aggressive behaviors against (brown) foreigners still indicate the extent of internalized xenophobia—a food server refusing to acknowledge my presence in a food stall, an old man at the train station yelling at us because we didn’t understand Mandarin, and migrants with lapsed visas normally referred to as runaways or criminals. 

To be sure, the environment is not as hostile as in the West, where outright physical violence is prevalent. But micro-aggression towards the Other still occurs, and while these nips are deemed tolerable, an accumulation will wear down even the strongest. 

Wasu and NuNu had a specialized method of exploring the landscape. By respectively lurking in Thai and Myanmar groups on Facebook, they were better able to glean stories from the ground. I chickened out of joining any Filipino groups under the guise of research, rationalizing that I’d be too depressed with whatever I’d find out.

Over casual discussions with artists/art and cultural stakeholders, we found time to learn about and share the current states of our countries.  We talked about the art ecology, the degrees of censorship, the community collaborations, the institutional support that fluctuated according to who got elected to government posts, the cultural industry, our reasons for being, our capacities to practice, and the histories that connected and disconnected us. 

As NuNu once explained to me, it was important for her to share stories about the Kachin, because to do so was essentially to make her people’s narratives visible to others (like us) who know so little about it. During a time that I managed to share an overview of Philippine politics, history and economics, a Taiwanese artist turned to me and said:  I had no idea that was what was happening there. 

Four weeks in Taiwan wasn’t sufficient time to fully observe the daily grind of artistic practice. While I understand that no country is without deep issues to resolve, it cannot be helped that the conditions in the Philippines magnified the opportunities I saw in theirs.

Overall, I was given the impression that to live and practice as an artist in Taiwan didn’t entail tethering one’s art to the market. A sound artist in Hsinchu who owns a vegan café-slash-book and zine store, mentioned how he found it still possible to live the balanced life. He has his experimental sound events, and he doesn’t perform to earn. Before I left his café, and to express support, I bought a zine made by an Indonesian musician said to be taking his graduate studies in Hsinchu.

Given the 30-day mark stamped on my visa, I left Taiwan. To continue my participation in the exchange program, Mekong Cultural Hub sent me to Cambodia. 

Flying to the Kingdom of Cambodia to observe art and cultural models required code-switching. I had come from an elsewhere—a small yet formidable nation that has already built its own submarine—to a place that is considered one of the poorest in Asia (much like where I come from). Within hours of arrival, without so much as a chance to check out Phnom Penh, I got into a car to head to Battambang. The mental and emotional processing I didn’t know I had to do was set aside, and my adaptation skills were immediately tested.

The 7-hour land travel from the capital to the countryside with Cambodians Phina So, a literary writer, and Sakun Po, an inclusive-arts advocate, facilitated my introduction to the country’s art and cultural landscape. During the car ride, we talked about press freedom, the educational system, the community pagoda’s networking structures, aspects of sustainability, and, yes, how on the global scale, our respective identities are constantly getting vetted. Traveling on the inauguration day of their new prime minister, I spotted the police cars on the road and sensed what I could possibly sense to know when to keep quiet. 

Much later in the course of my stay, I learned that to be in Cambodia is to grasp its different sets of historical narratives: the Angkor Empire where its monumental temple still stands in Siem Reap; the French occupation; the US bombings of Cambodia in the early 1970s; the Khmer Rouge-instigated genocide that claimed the lives of 2 million of its people; the civil unrest in the 1990s; the influx of NGOs from which probably sprang the social enterprise models and increase in foreign volunteers I saw everywhere; and the present day where the past and its consequences still affect everything. 

Cambodia is like the Philippines. It’s economically struggling, yet, almost perversely, it has a spectacular array of buildings in the capital, along with occasional luxury cars like Bentleys and Porsches on the road. NagaWorld, a huge casino, stands next to a Buddhist institute in the center of Phnom Penh. How its zoning laws work remains a puzzle to me. Chinese-connected political and economic infrastructures are deeply lodged in its economy, and history as a subject is tip-toed around in schools. 

The kingdom’s population of around 17 million equals that of Metro Manila. The distribution of its resources is akin to ours: Their 1% is excessively wealthy, and the rest of the population is composed of clusters of the middle class and those whose homes are without water and proper toilets. Unemployment is high and the country primarily lives off foreign relief––not from the remittances of its citizens working abroad, but from other countries giving aid. Yet, whenever I was in Phnom Penh, I was reminded by kind strangers to be mindful of my bag as snatchers were everywhere.

A big number of mostly European and American passport-holders reside in Cambodia. Their euros and dollars go a long way, and so do their privileges. Colonialism is alive: In Southeast Asia, white skin still reigns supreme.

To have a critical understanding of the country is to be conscious of its linked histories with neighboring Mekong states: Thailand, Vietnam and Laos. French occupation being one of their common denominators, this landlocked region and their fluctuating borders (or state of un/friendliness) rest on constant conflicts that involve bloody wars over territories. Vietnam’s Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) used to be Prey Nokor, a Khmer sea port. 

The lokru––a Khmer term meaning a male teacher (nekru is a female teacher)––periodically yelled at me as I clumsily tried to juggle: “Cadence! Cadence!”  He didn’t speak much English but he spoke French. Google Translate hardly helped us, although I sometimes understood him, owing to my studying basic French in school. To study 3-ball juggling from a 36-year-old retired circus performer turned teacher at Phare Ponleu Selpak (PPS) was an amalgam of lessons in language, hand and eye coordination, and history.

PPS, an educational and performing facility, hosted my stay in Battambang. The institution finds its origins in Site 2 of the Thai refugee camp in 1986 where children who survived the Khmer Rouge genocide also processed their trauma through art. Nine of the original students (now men in their early 50s) and their female French art teacher founded a school to help the Battambang community. 

Nowadays, PPS is a visual and performing arts school. Students in the visual art department study either painting or graphic design and animation while those who prefer the performing arts are students in circus, or theater, or traditional dance and music. The educational paradigm leans toward market sustainability––skills and appreciation are taught, but the immediate concern is job placement in the locality, or elsewhere.

European and American visitors describe Battambang as quaint and beautiful. The predominantly agrarian area is the source of Cambodia’s rice production, and as a tourist destination, it’s agrarian meets cafes, hotels, and backpackers. 

Battambang reminded me of an Amorsolo painting in the Philippines—with the idyll as its packaged exotique. The romanticization of the Asian rural life is Battambang’s selling point. Tours in the province involve visitors exploring the countryside through organized and paid activities such as bicycle rides by the rice fields, cooking Khmer food, and experiencing the local market. 

One can also take basic circus lessons from PPS, like I did. And when the heat, humidity, flash floods, mosquitoes, etc., start to interfere with the utopian rural escape fantasy, the chic artisanal cafes in French-colonial-style architectures, rooftop bars and numerous pool resorts are there to help cushion the visitors from the perils of Southeast Asian reality. 

The high peak of my stay there was riding the local bamboo train.

But the disconcerting part of the tourist industry includes a visit to the Killing Caves, where soldiers of the Khmer Rouge disposed of thousands of corpses of (or sometimes still alive) Cambodians who were bludgeoned to death because bullets were expensive. To enter the caves is to catch sight of human skulls encased in glass and kept company by a massive statue of a reclining Buddha. At the entrance, the sculptures that greet visitors give the place a kitsch horror theme park appeal—and then one realizes, after closer inspection, that the cement figures are frozen scenes of torture and killing. 

I hadn’t the faintest idea that the driver would take us there. The original plan was just to witness the big bat population emerging from another cave. I hadn’t the intention of visiting after reading historical accounts about it. Only when Phnom Penh-based contemporary artist Tan Vatey whispered to me where we were that I immediately retreated. 

I found the placement of death and solemnity alongside nature a completely disturbing experience. 

Still looking for answers to my questions, I found a book by Arn-Chorn Pond, the founder of Cambodian Living Arts (CLA). He lived in Battambang, and it’s unfortunate that I didn’t meet him. In the harrowing book “Never Fall Down,” an account of his surviving under Khmer Rouge rule as an 11-year-old, he talked about how long trauma hardly escapes anyone. He is now 56 years old.

Sinta Wibowo, a Belgian-Indonesian music and film festival organizer based in Phnom Penh, pointed to a building and told me it’s S-21. We were with Tan Vatey and another colleague of theirs on the way to an artist studio when I looked out from the speeding tuktuk to see a line leading towards what looked like a ticket counter. It was disorienting to learn that the infamous prison was located in the heart of a residential neighborhood in Phnom Penh. I had imagined that given its brutal history, people wouldn’t even consider living so close to it.

S-21, or the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, was once a high school building; it was converted in 1975 into a prison and execution center where Khmer Rouge soldiers tortured and killed approximately 20,000 people. Only 12 of all who were brought there survived: 7 adults and 5 children.

In 1979-1980 it was converted into a historical museum. It’s one of the places I decided not to visit.

I traveled to Phnom Penh whenever I felt depressingly fractured by feelings of isolation and loneliness in Battambang. If in Taiwan I was able to form a local network with artists and cultural workers ((with whom I maintain continuing conversations and friendships), in Battambang there was hardly any reciprocal exchange. Emails and phone messages were either unanswered or written off, with the artists declaring themselves busy. 

To stay in Battambang was to watch the everyday in quiet observance of communal relations and community structures. It was Kimhuy, the nice manager of the vegetarian restaurant I frequented, who told me that Cambodian Buddhist monks eat meat. It was Yunsun, a Korean yoga volunteer instructor at PPS, with whom I ended up learning about other voluntary works in the province, such as hospital food distribution.

From the occasional visitors to Battambang (Phnom Penh filmmakers, mostly), I learned the basic disposition of the people––to ask questions and to get answers were two tricky things. From the books I found at the school library, and from journals sent by Filipino colleagues such as The Museum Collective, I learned that about 90% of the artists were executed during the Khmer Rouge’s bloody reign. Painters, craftspeople, musicians, writers, dancers, singers, actors, professors, movie directors, playwrights, college students, professors, costume designers, even just anyone who wore eyeglasses, were tortured and killed. Family members were not spared; if they weren’t shot or beaten, they died of starvation.

The few who were able to escape and seek refuge abroad found themselves scattered in Europe, Asia and the United States. Old movies, books, and important creative works that were considered reminders of a rich cultural past were all destroyed.

Cambodia’s current age demographics indicate that only 6% of its population aged 60 years old and above are still alive.  

To also stay where one of the (many) killing fields used to be is to suddenly feel my concerns about art practically moot and senseless. For someone like me who was born in the 1970s, it is to collapse into the frightening awareness that my generation may not have lived through that time had I been a different kind of Southeast Asian.

At Siem Reap (a 5-hour bus ride from Battambang), I listened to Un, my tour guide at the Angkor Wat. As we talked about the monumental temple––its structural, political, social and aesthetic significance––I periodically asked him things: What was it like during the pandemic lockdowns? Do Khmers leave for abroad and never come back? How did you become a tour guide? Did you vote in the last election?  

Between his showing me the bullets that remain embedded in some of the columns of the Angkor Wat and our exchange of views on the return of stolen statues, Un didn’t look like he minded digressing from his script. But he did choose to answer which questions I threw his way. He told me about Cambodia’s economy being dependent on tourism, and that the tourists we saw that day were a mere fraction of the number of visitors in 2019. He wished that there would be more visitors again. During the pandemic, there was no job for him. His family was so hard hit that his mother had to hock her earrings for a few days’ worth of food. He also laughingly told me of the time a foreigner approached him—he was then 10 years old—and offered to buy his baby brother for US$1,000. He was genuinely excited about the thought of receiving that much money, and couldn’t understand why his parents refused the offer and were so angry.

Baby kidnappings are not unusual stories. They are shocking, but not strange. In some chic cafes in Battambang, there are brochures warning foreigners about orphanage scams. In the past, many babies and small children were said to have been kidnapped and sold to foreigners. In some cases, due to poverty, mothers just gave up their children. 

Un and I easily switched topics to allow him to finish his tour spiel (“Did you watch ‘Tomb Raider?’” he asked), and, along with discussing the bas-relief on the walls of the temples, we also talked about big luxury brands usurping natural Southeast Asian resources as their own. 

Mired by my weary seclusion in the countryside, I found the energy of Phnom Penh peculiarly uplifting. I didn’t expect people to accelerate my emotional grounding or sympathize with my feelings of existential displacement, as I had no way to properly process what I’d been learning. But what I did find was a different type of vibrancy among the artists and cultural workers. 

During the time I spent with them, conversations ranged from finding ourselves in art residencies––in high periods of stress and confusion––to looking at each other’s current artworks or writings. We spoke about collaborations, cooperation, conflicts, moving houses, luggage, day jobs, and even about saving up to buy a washing machine for a new art space in the context of dollar conversions. With them I saw drag shows, and looked at modernist buildings, and went to noodle shops. We talked about ethics in theater practices and dilemmas in festivals, and we discussed the contextualized artworld.  We wondered about reliving histories and being productive and creative amid censorships. 

Some of us talked, some of us met again and forgot we’d already met, and some of us didn’t have the slightest desire to share anything with the other.

The narrative is unchanged: As people in the field of art- and culture-making, we are tasked to constantly find jobs and projects that provide a livelihood to pay for bills and daily living. All that we personally produce is sustained by various channels to self-sufficiency.

From these small conversations and exchanges and later from consults with MCH’s Frances Rudgard, and from existing research, I learned that the starting point for creativity doesn’t necessarily have to be fixed on what was usually expected of Cambodians. Their horrible past isn’t their only story, and to be Cambodian doesn’t mean being trapped in talking about it. Then again, not to predictably jump off from standard themes in their output doesn’t necessarily signify erasure, reflect denial, or demonstrate forgetting. 

For the young (under 50 and thereabouts), a new way of seeing and representation must be viewed as an equally important exploration. 

I returned to Manila in October, and I’ve created some distance from what I experienced. Sinta Wibowo’s stringing of the words “temporary togetherness” still sticks with me.  I use the phrase to denote the concept of impermanent communities. I cling to it because when I arrived in Cambodia I was a stranger, and when I left I was still, for the most part, a stranger. 

It can also be said of my stay in Taiwan—although frankly, being in Taiwan felt cheerier.

As I continue to reflect on varying histories and support systems, while perpetually coping with the Philippines’ own sense of chaos, I hold on to what CLA founder Arn Chorn-Pond said in his search for a refugee camp: I walk, stumble, my leg like no bone in them, then walk again. This is the only thing to do. Keep walking.

Read more: Artist paints tribute to heroes in time for Independence Day

The post Artist researching: Experience curves in Taiwan and Cambodia appeared first on CoverStory.

When Cambodia’s rainy season turns dirt roads into rutted mud, the villages tucked into rugged folds of the western Cardamom Mountains can feel far from just about everything.

In the Areng Valley, a river-carved flatland in the range sparsely populated by villages of Indigenous Chorng people, that includes any semblance of cellular reception.

This means it’s usually best to meet in person with Reem Souvsee, the deputy chief of the valley’s Chomnoab commune. Otherwise, Souvsee explained, she might get some reception near the roof of her house or up the neighboring mountains where local men go to harvest resin from trees to sell for a bit of income.

Despite that isolation, in recent months this stretch of rural communities among densely jungled peaks has been pulled into the center of global debate about carbon credits—a development scheme organized under a U.N.-backed framework called REDD+.

These credits are intended to limit the emissions that cause climate change by preventing deforestation in places like Areng. They’re purchased by major polluters, including some of the world’s largest oil and gas firms, to offset their fossil fuel emissions by essentially sponsoring the protection of forests in developing countries such as Cambodia.

Some of these credits are already coming from the mountains near Souvsee’s home, which lies within the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project. Managed by the nonprofit Wildlife Alliance in partnership with the Cambodian government, the roughly 4,453-square-kilometer project in Koh Kong province includes portions of two national parks and another officially protected area. It is the largest of four such registered carbon credit zones in Cambodia.

The project has also been seen abroad as one of the flagships for the burgeoning climate finance sector. But that image took a major hit in June when the world’s leading carbon credit registry service, a U.S.-based nonprofit called Verra, abruptly suspended issuing new credits for the site in response to an as-yet-unreleased investigation from global advocacy group Human Rights Watch alleging rights abuses by environmental officials and rangers within the project area.

The finer mechanics of the carbon credit model are mostly unknown to locals in Areng, who were unaware of these developments. But Souvsee—a member of Cambodia’s beleaguered political opposition Candlelight Party and a former affiliate with the conservation activist group Mother Nature—saw reason to support the program, which has funded local infrastructure and community development.

For rural forest communities such as those in Areng, the threat posed by outside companies is very real.

Rights organizations annually rank Cambodia among the most corrupt in the world, pointing to well-documented elite networks that have granted themselves near-total control of the Kingdom’s natural resources under a sprawling political patronage system. This has seen the country’s once-vast forests and other officially protected landscapes traditionally doled out among an overlapping class of tycoons and politicians, usually to be stripped for timber and developed into agricultural plantations.

At the same time, the Cambodian government has pledged to expand carbon credit programs across its many officially protected areas, as well as deepen its partnership with regional finance hub Singapore to bring its sprouting credits to a global market.

The Ministry of Environment has announced at least eight credit projects in the works in recent years, with two currently awaiting registration with Verra. Officials didn’t answer questions about their plans when contacted by a reporter.

Some conservationists argue that the basic financial premise of REDD+ offers an alternative path forward, a means of changing the status quo for forests in Cambodia and other developing countries. They say credit sales provide a funding model that is actually sustainable on the ground, allowing for more concerted efforts to protect nature. Project developers also assert that a system that rewards states for keeping trees standing—as opposed to clear-cutting for timber, mining, or other development—is a much-needed step in the future of environmental protection.

But critics say these plans still fail to defuse the key drivers of deforestation by powerful economic interests, especially in countries such as Cambodia where land rights and environmental protections wither in the face of political clout and profit-seeking. Worse, some say, the brunt of the protections brought with REDD+ often fall on some of the world’s poorest communities—often smallholder farmers who depend on forests to eke out subsistence livelihoods.

The recent Verra suspension has cast a critical spotlight on the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project.

Verra stated that it was investigating the situation in Southern Cardamom further, but did not comment beyond that. Human Rights Watch also did not disclose their report to the Globe.

Though minimal details from the group’s study have been made public, its researchers had reportedly documented rights violations carried out against local people by public officials and conservation rangers in the development of the REDD+ project.

Even just a hint of these preliminary findings was immediately familiar to many in Cambodia.

Though the forests under its watch remain some of the thickest in the country, Wildlife Alliance has long been accused of heavy-handed enforcement of environmental restrictions with often-impoverished local villagers. The not-yet-public Human Rights Watch report likely taps into this history.

Suwanna Gauntlett, Wildlife Alliance CEO and founder, denies abuses, saying her organization is working to support rural livelihoods while safeguarding protected areas. She places the group’s role in Cambodia in a longer arc of conservation in the Kingdom, tracing back to the group’s earliest days in 2000—operating in a near-lawless environment to fight land-grabbing, human-caused forest fires and widespread poaching.

On the ground

The Southern Cardamom REDD+ project seemed to provide a ready case study for bigger questions facing climate financing in Cambodia. So as part of a broader investigation of greenwashing conducted in partnership with the Earth Journalism Network, reporters from the Southeast Asia Globe and the U.K.-based outlet SourceMaterial spent about a week total traveling through the Southern Cardamom zone over two separate trips.

With regular check-ins and surveillance from local police, reporters spoke with more than 30 people in communities around the area. These interviews ranged from villagers and local officials to Wildlife Alliance employees.

What they found was a mixed bag.

“On the whole, we’re happy with REDD+,” said Chhan Kong, 41, a fisherman and rice farmer living in the village of Teuk La’ak. “[But] the rangers can be harsh and aggressive.”

When he and others ventured into the protected area to make camp and fish—a permitted activity—Kong said they ran the risk of having their camping equipment confiscated or destroyed by rangers.

This was a common thread in many interviews, and locals also told reporters they felt compelled to run at the sight of rangers lest they run afoul of restrictions. Those caught breaking the rules could be sent to court, villagers said.

Maybe the most notable recent incident in the REDD+ zone that the Globe heard of involved a then-62-year-old woman who was briefly detained by rangers about two years ago. Presumably on the way to their station, the rangers let her go with no further action after other community members went to advocate for her release.

Still frightened and confused, she told reporters the rangers had picked her up for cutting a small tree near her farm.

As with her case, the single-most common appeal was for greater communication and cooperation, especially for farmers, fisherfolk and others around the boundaries and enforcement of protected areas. A Wildlife Alliance field official who spoke with reporters said there was signage to mark these edges and showed them a detailed map, but acknowledged it wasn’t distributed to local people.

Hoeng Pov, a Chorng community representative in Areng Valley, said even commune officials often lacked key information about the project.

Though questions remained, almost everyone reporters spoke with agreed on the importance of protecting the forest.

Besides the carbon-absorbing benefits that trees and other plant life provide on their own, cutting them down also has massive impacts on the climate—deforestation contributes as much as 20% to global carbon emissions.

According to the nonprofit Global Forest Watch, Cambodia has lost about 31% of its tree cover since 2000, amounting to about 1.57 gigatons of carbon emissions.

At the same time, its forays into carbon crediting have produced mixed results.

Of its four Verra-registered REDD+ projects, two have experienced severe deforestation. One of these is in the province of Oddar Meanchey and the other is called Tumring, located on the edge of the country’s once-vast, now-vanishing Prey Lang forest.

Regarded as the largest lowland evergreen forest remaining in mainland Southeast Asia, even the protected areas of Prey Lang are steadily dissolving under industrial-scale logging operations.

Tumring was developed in partnership with the South Korean government, but primarily overseen by the Cambodian Forestry Administration. Forestry expert Ida Theilade said satellite imagery has shown dramatic loss of tree cover at the project site, and it’s unclear if it’s actually selling credits.

Oddar Meanchey, Cambodia’s first foray into carbon crediting, has suffered a similar fate. With backing from the U.N. Development Program, the project initially found commitments from organizations such as Disney and Virgin Airlines to buy credits. But the corporate backers canceled after it became apparent that local officials and military units had asserted their own claims to officially protected land.

Meanwhile, Cambodia’s second-largest REDD+ project—managed by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) at the Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary in the northern province of Mondulkiri—is generally considered a success.

Colin Moore, the Southeast Asia regional REDD+ coordinator for WCS, said revenues from the credits sold from the project have been a game-changer for the group’s work on the site.

Moore said WCS works with Everland, a company based in the United States, to market and sell the credits from REDD+ projects to buyers around the world. Everland also does the same for the Southern Cardamom project.

When credits are sold from Keo Seima, a portion of the sales revenue goes to Everland or other fees, but the proceeds are split between WCS Cambodia and the Environment Ministry. Moore said the breakdown is 20% for the ministry, 80% for the project, deposited into an account managed by WCS.

That latter pool of money goes into funding conservation projects within Keo Seima, including personnel and programming related to rural livelihoods, community land titling, and more.

Both Moore and Wildlife Alliance declined to say how much in total their credit sales have made over the life of the project so far. Local media has quoted government officials stating the Environment Ministry itself has raised $11.6 million in carbon credit sales since 2016, which would be only a portion of the total revenues.

Moore said the successes of the Keo Seima and Southern Cardamom REDD+ projects were the “proof of concept” before the Cambodian government’s current push to develop more credit programs. A boost in global interest in financing such projects since 2021—the first year of the Paris Agreement commitment period—also helped drive interest, he added.

Critiques and hopes

Conservation funding aside, critics of REDD+ have not found it a convincing model to mitigate climate change.

An extensive report from a carbon trading research center at the University of California, Berkeley, asserted last month that loose REDD+ assessments and quality control practices by Verra are leading to “overcrediting” and “exaggerated” claims about the impact of such projects.

As a result, they said, credits sold under the promise of directly offsetting specific amounts of carbon emissions likely represent only “a small fraction of their claimed climate benefit.” The researchers also wrote that REDD+ projects focus their enforcement efforts on rural, often-impoverished forest communities while remaining unable to address large-scale deforestation caused by more powerful economic interests.

“Our overall conclusion is that REDD+ is ill-suited to the generation of carbon credits for use as offsets,” the researchers wrote, adding that the current “market system creates a race to the bottom that is hard to emerge from.”

Those within the sector itself have a different view.

Everland President Joshua Tosteson freely admits the industry is imperfect but is adamant that its basic premise is a good one when done properly. He said he hadn’t read the UC Berkeley report in depth, but noted that he agreed with it that the Verra system allowed for a “wide variability right now in respect to how projects get set up in relation to the communities.” 

“There isn’t really like what you might call a normative standard, a quality standard for how things ought to be done,” he said, adding that applied to things such as gaining free prior and informed consent and revenue sharing with local people.

That makes it hard to properly gauge how well projects actually address the underlying social and economic reasons for forest loss, Tosteson added. 

Beyond that, he rejected the larger denunciations of the UC Berkeley report, ascribing some of its findings to a broader wariness of using market solutions to address deforestation or climate change issues. However, for a country such as Cambodia, he thought the financial incentive that REDD+ brought to conservation could help keep trees standing.

At Wildlife Alliance’s offices in Phnom Penh, Gauntlett and her organization also stand by their work.

In addition to using the revenues from carbon credit sales to fund protection of the REDD+ area, the group also listed a range of material investments in the rural communities within the Southern Cardamom project.

Besides helping start community-based ecotourism centers, Gauntlett also said her group had shored up land tenure for residents in the REDD+ zone by facilitating the government’s processing of just under 5,000 hard land titles—a level of official recognition of ownership that is often difficult to secure in Cambodia—covering nearly 12,250 parcels of private land in the REDD+ zone. She expected the Ministry of Land Management to issue an additional 7,249 titles by 2024.

Gauntlett also listed infrastructure developments, such as about 28 kilometers of new or rehabilitated roads in the project zone, 94 solar-powered water wells, 77 toilets, two schools, and a bridge. Wildlife Alliance also funded 16 full university scholarships for students to study in and live in Phnom Penh, she said.

Reporters were able to see much of the hard infrastructure for themselves as they traveled through the project area. In the Areng Valley, one older resident said the newly installed toilet was the first she had ever had.

While the Wildlife Alliance REDD+ program officially started in 2015, Gauntlett said her organization had first tried to establish the program in 2008 – but was rejected by the Cambodian government.

“Finally, when REDD started, it was pretty much already all done. It wasn’t a decision that came out of the blue like this,” she said. When asked why the government had initially been against it, Gauntlett was concise.

‘An illusion’

However, the incentives offered by climate finance will need to compete with more short-term motivations. Not everyone shares Gauntlett’s optimism that carbon credits are up to the task.

The forester Theilade is among those who do not share Gauntlett’s optimism. She focuses primarily on the vanishing Prey Lang forest and the community networks that have struggled to maintain it against powerful interests.

Theilade was also involved in the early 2000s in helping the Cambodian government develop its REDD+ Roadmap, a planning process funded by the World Bank that ostensibly evolved into the Kingdom’s current strategy.

Today, she occasionally reviews conservation proposals that include carbon trading components, but she does not work specifically with crediting schemes.

Theilade is not involved with Wildlife Alliance or its work in Southern Cardamom but said she had read about the organization’s presence there. Although she gave them some credit, she said Cambodia’s extensive patronage system leaves no room for good intentions, especially where forestland is concerned.

Such an outcome has already happened to Wildlife Alliance elsewhere in the country. Last year, its partners in the Forestry Administration conspired with local officials and prominent tycoons to clear-cut and parcel out a smaller forest that Wildlife Alliance had preserved just outside the Phnom Penh metropolitan area.

The conservation group had used that area, known as Phnom Tamao, as a sanctuary for rare and endangered animals. Although a rare surge of public discontent halted development of the land, the forest itself was decimated.

Based on global prices for carbon on the offsets market, Theilade thought that carbon credits could not compete with other land uses associated with the patronage system, especially timber logged from protected areas.

Although she gently cautioned that she did not want to sound too negative about the work being done by some conservation groups to develop such schemes, Theilade simply did not see them as a realistic option given the political weight against conservation.

“It has to be a government or a culture that decides that these forests are worth something to us,” she said, describing the various ecological, social and spiritual benefits that forests provide in Cambodia.

Additional reporting by Anton L. Delgado, Meng Kroypunlok, Roun Ry and SourceMaterial. This story was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network for the “It’s a Wash” special report. The original story can be found here.

See: Blueprint for disaster: Singapore’s carbon hub threatens global climate targets

The post Carbon ambitions: Inside Cambodia’s REDD+ boom appeared first on CoverStory.

The wedding was just ending when the motorbike chase began.

Rangers had arrested Meng Sotear, a 62-year-old rice and cashew farmer, ordered her aboard a motorbike and raced towards their headquarters 10 kilometers down a dirt road in one of Cambodia’s remotest valleys. Calling an abrupt end to the festivities, local chief Huang Pou and some 40 other wedding guests leapt aboard their own machines and raced to intercept. 

The resulting confrontation, which took place in 2021 and saw Meng freed by her neighbors, was just one of a series of clashes between villagers and rangers at the Southern Cardamom reserve, home to one of the world’s flagship carbon offsetting projects. 

Wildlife Alliance, a US non-profit group, sells credits generated by protecting forests there to companies including Air France, Gucci and Deliveroo, who then claim to have cancelled out carbon emissions. On a recent trip to Southern Cardamom, SourceMaterial heard allegations of human rights infringements, while independent analysis suggests the project’s offsetting claims are significantly overstated. 

Now a plan forged in Singapore aims to transform carbon credits like Southern Cardamom’s from a voluntary tool used by corporations to burnish their green image into a means for helping nations meet their 2015 Paris Agreement’s targets on global warming. 

Counting these carbon credits towards emissions cuts risks glossing over potential human rights abuses—and will give a misleading impression of how close the world is to meeting its goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, says Eftimiya Salo, director of carbon markets at Carbonaide, a carbon technology company.

It’s a “blueprint for disaster” that threatens to “make climate change even worse,” she said.

Offsetting schemes can play an important role in funding conservation, and some Southern Cardamom residents told SourceMaterial and its partners, Southeast Asia Globe and Süddeutsche Zeitung, that they support the project’s aims despite complaints about the rangers. 

In a statement, Wildlife Alliance said the project “is preserving the forest and promoting local livelihoods,” as well as “supporting the respect and protection of human rights.” It said 3,957 local families are benefiting from the project through increased access to clean water, roads, toilets and education.

In Chi Phat, a village in the southern Cardamom Mountains, Sen Voleak, a fisherman’s wife whose family shares a two-room fishing shack lit by a single bulb wired to a car battery, said the heavy-handed tactics of Wildlife Alliance’s rangers are making it hard to survive. 

“It’s difficult enough for us to make a living,” she said. “I wish they’d stop burning our things.”

Two become one

A thousand kilometers south of Chi Phat at Singapore’s five-star Shangri-La hotel, where rooms start at $262 a night, cocktails at $17 and a shot of 50-year-old Guyanese rum costs $800, Mikkel Larsen is setting out his vision for global carbon trading.

Larsen is the chief executive officer of Climate Impact X, the carbon exchange created by Singapore’s state wealth fund, its stock exchange, and two banks. The 48-year-old Danish vegan, who doesn’t own a car and has 17 personalized “sustainability development goals” as a “road-map” for life, wants to unify the global offsetting market—with Singapore at its heart.

For nearly two decades, governments in the European Union have required polluters who exceed emissions limits to buy certificates from less polluting businesses in a system known as ‘cap and trade’. Meanwhile, a voluntary carbon market has emerged in the private sector, where companies can buy credits like the ones generated by Wildlife Alliance in Cambodia to show investors and consumers that they are reducing their impact on the climate.     

Five years from now, these two markets will have become one, Larsen told international lawyers gathered at the Shangri-La on 29 August. Singapore has already begun its merger of regulated and voluntary markets, allowing companies to use voluntary offsets to pay carbon taxes.

All this is designed to turn Singapore into a trading hub for carbon credits. It’s a “blueprint for an international market,” Larsen said.

Singapore’s efforts are motivated more by profit and power than concern for the climate, says Axel Michaelowa, head of international climate policy at the University of Zurich.

“It’s clear that the demand side for credits that come through the Singaporean hub is not environmentally driven,” he said. “They’ve been warned on this but they don’t care.”

In January, an investigation by SourceMaterial, the Guardian and Die Zeit revealed that as many as 94 per cent of the forest offsets most commonly used in carbon markets do almost nothing to mitigate climate change. Of the 11 projects that launched Singapore’s carbon exchange this summer, eight face questions about their effectiveness and eight have been criticized for their treatment of local people.

Larsen told SourceMaterial that Climate Impact X has a process for evaluating the quality of credits before they are admitted to its exchange. He said that the debate about merging compulsory and voluntary markets should be kept separate from a discussion about the effectiveness of traded credits “as they are independent subject matters.”

“The reality is some countries do not have available solutions that allow them to take steps to fully decarbonize,” Larsen said. “Access to cross-border solutions allows these countries to engage others for practical solutions.”

Leaked draft 

Singapore’s government is in talks with 14 countries to buy their carbon credits and count them towards its treaty commitments to cut emissions.

A draft agreement from one of those negotiations leaked to SourceMaterial suggests Singapore will purchase credits issued by any of seven major registries including the Global Carbon Council, set up by Qatar to offset last year’s World Cup. Last year SourceMaterial revealed that GCC credits are nearly all of a type rejected by most registries because they do little to prevent global warming.

If the draft becomes policy, Singapore will also buy credits approved by the world’s largest registry, Verra—a move that would transform the US-based non-profit company from a self-appointed certifier in a voluntary market to a de facto regulator of international emissions agreements, says Zurich University’s Michaelowa. 

“Verra now will be part of the compliance ecosystem,” he said. “Nobody will be able to criticize Verra anymore for selling flimsy stuff because it’s government-approved.”

Following SourceMaterial’s joint investigation in January raising doubts about the ineffectiveness of almost all of Verra’s forest conservation credits, its chief executive resigned. A series of other studies have found similar results and the carbon market has since shrunk by an estimated 75 per cent.

In June Verra announced that it was suspending credits from Southern Cardamom after a letter from Human Rights Watch and that it would investigate the allegations.

The letter accused Wildlife Alliance of failing to secure proper consent for the project among locals, something the organization denied in a statement to SourceMaterial.

The suspension sent shockwaves through the global carbon market. Trafigura, the world’s biggest oil trader which set up a carbon offsets desk in 2021, complained that it was stranded with millions of Southern Cardamom credits it couldn’t sell.

Wildlife Alliance said in a statement that the Southern Cardamom project “is a responsible and effective conservation initiative that benefits both the environment and the local community.” Any review by Verra should be “comprehensive” and should also include positive impacts of the project on communities and the forest, it said.

A Singaporean government spokesperson told SourceMaterial that the administration hasn’t yet made a final decision on which credits it will accept and “is committed to upholding high environment integrity standards.”

“I live in a forest”

Meng Sotear, whose arrest sparked the motorbike chase, was tending her rice farm when the armed rangers appeared. 

Like many Cardamom Mountains residents, Meng had always used traditional farming techniques, planting one area for two or three years until the soil deteriorated and then moving to a new plot, returning two or three years later when the old one had recovered.

The plantation where Meng was arrested was communal and used by many families in the village. Meng told SourceMaterial it had been part of her planting cycle for 20 years and no one had told her not to farm there. But after the attempted arrest, rangers destroyed it. Now she is left with only one plot, behind her house, and worries the rangers will return.

Younger farmers said that whenever they see Wildlife Alliance rangers, they run (“like they’re tigers”). Many, like Meng, have stopped rotating their plots out of fear and confusion, and say their crops have suffered as a result.

Sok Sal, 34, a farmer in the nearby village of Toap Khley, says rangers destroyed his farm but he fled before they could arrest him. Wildlife Alliance says locals are allowed to farm certain areas of the forest, but none of the people SourceMaterial interviewed during a four-day trip to the reserve could identify the boundaries. 

“They know,” said Wildlife Alliance ranger Thorn Bun Tharoth, pointing to a map of the permitted areas—though when pressed he admitted that most villagers do not have access to it. 

And while some residents confess to using locally felled trees to build their homes, they question how else they are supposed to survive.

“I live in a forest,” said Ourn Vorng, 31. “Of course my house is made of wood.”

Farmers like Ourn say their traditional livelihood, based on small plantations and limited logging to build homes, has little impact on the forest. Meanwhile big companies are clear-cutting thousands of hectares—but Wildlife Alliance targets them rather than confront Cambodia’s powerful tycoons, they say.

Wildlife Alliance did protest loudly in 2022 over threats to permit industrial logging at Phnom Tamao, another of its nature reserves, just outside the capital, Phnom Penh. But the government ignored its entreaties and the clear-cutting went ahead, halted only after a public outcry when swathes of the reserve had already been destroyed.

So far companies have used offsets worth around $60 million from Southern Cardamom and Wildlife Alliance is planning to replicate the model across Cambodia. Even without the threat of industrial logging, there are concerns about whether its offsets are effective.

An analysis by Renoster, a ratings agency for carbon projects, showed 1,466 hectares of nature reserve had been deforested in the conservation area between 2015 and 2020, where Wildlife Alliance had said there had been none, and found that the project overstated the carbon it removed from the atmosphere by about 300 per cent.

Wildlife Alliance said in a sponsored article for the Phnom Penh Post that a large portion of revenue from its carbon credit sales “is used to finance benefits for local communities as well as environmental conservation.”

“Broken promises”

Wildlife Alliance was founded by Suwanna Gauntlett, a US pharmaceuticals heiress who attributes her interest in conservation to seeing a jaguar tortured by Brazilian poachers and now lives in Phnom Penh. The organization came to Southern Cardamom in 2002, initially to protect endangered species like sun bears and pangolins, before moving into carbon offsetting in 2018. 

To set up the nature reserve that now hosts the offsetting project, Wildlife Alliance in 2004 persuaded families there to abandon their homes and move to a new settlement, Sovanna Baitong, about 10 kilometers away.

Nearly two decades later, some say that despite a well sunk by Wildlife Alliance at one end of the village they don’t have easy access to clean water, while others claim they have still not received the land titles that the organization promised them in return for relocating.

“We feel as if we’re living on a boat in the middle of a lake,” said Leang Yoeurn, 37, who fears losing her land. “We feel it can be taken from us at any time.”

Wildlife Alliance has also installed grievance boxes in the villages for residents to express complaints—although one local, Ven Vorn, said he hadn’t bothered as he didn’t think anyone would listen.

The allegations from Southern Cardamom are not unique. Cambodian news site CamboJA reported recently that further north, in another part of the Cardamoms, Wildlife Alliance rangers had burned down the homes of impoverished farmers.

Wildlife Alliance said in a statement that it “strongly refutes” the “unsubstantiated” CamboJA report and that the Southern Cardamom project “is a prime example of how conservation and community development are going hand in hand”.

In its statement to SourceMaterial, the organization said that since 2012 local authorities have issued 4,999 land titles in the project zone, 629 of them in Sovanna Baitong, and expects another 7,249 titles to be issued by January 2024.

Wildlife Alliance also listed benefits it had provided residents with, including 94 solar-powered wells and two schools.

Paris threat

Amid plans by Singapore and its allies for a seismic shift in the way carbon credits are used, the controversy around Southern Cardamom resonates beyond the remote valleys of Western Cambodia. 

Despite a recent dip in prices, Barclays estimates the carbon market will be worth $250 billion by 2030 and pressure from governments to use offsets to meet their treaty obligations is mounting. 

Insiders at last year’s COP27 climate summit say the US and Canada joined Singapore in lobbying heavily to include voluntary credits in an inter-government carbon market, and the proposals are set to spark a key debate at COP28 in Dubai this November. 

But bringing credits from Southern Cardamom and hundreds of similar projects worldwide into international climate pacts could seriously undermine efforts to keep global warming to within 1.5 degrees, said Salo of Carbonaide.

“These low-quality credits will put us off track of reaching the Paris Agreement targets,” she said.

Some Cambodian names have been changed. This story was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network for the “It’s a Wash” special report. The original story can be found here.

See: ‘Get Out of Jail Free’: How plastics offsetting is giving industry a license to pollute

The post Blueprint for disaster: Singapore’s carbon hub threatens global climate targets appeared first on CoverStory.