Dan's Papers - October 5, 2007 - Review: Dr. Mok Mareth

On September 25, Stony Brook Southampton's much-anticipated lecture series commenced with a discussion of Environmental Management in Cambodia, led by the Kingdom of Cambodia's own Minister of the Environment. As the longest serving Minister of the Environment in the world, Dr. Mareth has ensured that his country's most precious national treasures remained intact through a three-decade-long civil war. He has promoted his country's signing of the Kyoto Protocol and implemented plans to voluntarily reduce Cambodia's greenhouse gas emissions by utilizing alternative fuel sources and thus lessening the country's ecological footprint on the Earth.

The bulk of the Minister's lecture focused on the problems Cambodia faces as a developing nation that is host to some of the most diverse and fragile habitats on Earth. Although the country itself is no larger than the state of Oklahoma, the Kingdom of Cambodia boasts both the largest lake in Southeast Asia, Tonle Sap Great Lake, and one of the richest mountain ecosystems in the world, the Cardamom Mountains. These mountains have so much biodiversity and rare, endemic plant and animal species that the United Nations has proposed it as a Natural World Heritage Site. Despite civil war and widespread poverty, Dr. Mareth has committed his career to ensuring that both the indigenous peoples and the endemic plant and animal species of these regions be preserved and protected.

In doing this, he has educated the 40,000 indigenous people living in the Cardamom mountains about the importance of mapping out their resources and making plans to utilize them all equally in a sustainable manner so that they do not disturb the natural cycle of the ecosystem in which they live. He has also initiated captive breeding and release programs for some of Cambodia's most endangered species, such as the rare Cambodian leopard. As the Cardamom Forest is responsible for regulating air temperature and water flow for the entire country of Cambodia, preserving this ecosystem is high on the Minister's list of priorities and he has enlisted the help of multiple international organizations, including U.S. Aid and other United States-based foundations to help restore deforested areas and protect untouched habitat from poachers, illegal loggers, land grabbers and illegal immigrants.

Some of his plans include mapping out a wide area of protected forest, with the villages located on the outskirts and a fringe of sustainable-use forest surrounding these villages, to allow indigenous people who rely on the forest to continue to manage their ecosystems, as part of the Minister's Community Use Plan. The Minister has also instigated training of local farmers to get more out of their land, thereby reducing the chances that a substance farmer will feel the need to slash and burn the forest in order to feed his family. "In the future," Dr. Mareth explained, "the benefits of these programs will flow to the people who care for the area and these places with be a center of education and a source of pride for all Cambodians."

Climate change was the other main focus of Dr. Mareth's speech, as it has caused more frequent floods and longer droughts to Cambodia in recent years. In 2002, only two years after Cambodia's civil war ended, the Kingdom of Cambodia acceded to the Kyoto Protocol, announcing to the world that they were ready to join in the fight to stop the human-driven acceleration of global warming and global climate change. Although they were not expected to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, Dr. Mareth implemented programs of rice husk cognation and methane capture, thus reducing Cambodia's waste products from their two largest industries, rice and pork production, and developing alternative energy sources that would greatly reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions. By using rice husks to power the rice processing plants and using methane from pig waste in a biogas digester to use as an alternate power source, Dr. Mareth hopes to make Cambodia an example of "how a small, poor country can participate in global CO2 emission reduction."

"Ninety percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from humans and their industries," Dr. Mareth stated. Under his tutelage, the Kingdom of Cambodia is doing all it can to ensure that they are contributing as little as possible to that statistic. Perhaps, in the coming years, more developed nations will take a cue from Cambodia and study how they too could curb their use of fossil fuels and be more self-reliant as they stand off against this seemingly inevitable catastrophe of global climate change.