Kompong Thom, March 18 – 20, 2015: A three-day sub-national workshop on Social Forestry in Climate Change (CC) was undertaken, under the theme “Community Forestry as a Strategy for Mitigation and Adaptation to Climate Change”. This workshop organized by The NGO Forum on Cambodia in partnership with NTFP-EP, RECOFTC and CSO REDD+ Network. The workshop gathered 25 representatives (three women) from Forestry Administration (FA), local FA and commune, Indigenous People alliance, local NGOs and Community Forestry (CF) network in Kompong Thom, Pursat and Preah Vihear to explore the evidence based of community forestry’s roles, lessons learned, best practices, issues and challenges as a key strategy toward green development.
The main objectives of this event were to share and learn from ongoing CF in practices, particularly in field of the CC, to gain better understanding of the CF roles in CC mitigation and adaption toward green growth, and lastly to strengthen and expand the network amongst CFs’ key identified stakeholders.
Mr. Nou Ran, one among the participants from Pursat, was very positive to be a part of this workshop, as he is not only having chances to learn more about the CC issue and community forestry, but to meet different CFs from various communities to share experience and learning from each other on the actual practice.
The workshop program was also injected the field study visit to Kbal Bai CF community, where the participants had the opportunity to evident a tangible practice and be able to analyze working activities that will help with the strategy development for CC mitigation and adaption in their own communities.
“It is very useful to attend this training and even more interesting that we manage to having enough time to visit Kbal Bai CF. From this trip, we can see in reality how do they do their and comparing to our present activities back in my community,” Ms. Keo Vanna, shared after the study visit. “However, there are not many women in this session, for we have only three women attended. I do hope to have more women joining us in the next activities because climate change is the problem for all regardless of the gender,” she added.
