Siem Reap 12–15 December 2018: Forum to accelerate efforts to wipe out root causes of climate change impact upon the livelihoods of Cambodia’s rural poor.

An unpredictable change of weather patterns and water supplies, a change of climate together, coupled with a low adaptive capacity are further challenging the livelihoods of Cambodia’s rural poor, who are heavily dependent on natural resource and farming for survival.

FAO through the Life and Nature Project (LNP) supports Cambodian rural poor to cope with the climate change and improve their food security and livelihoods. As stated by the Representative of FAO in Cambodia, Mr Alexandre Huynh, “climate change requires specific and sustainable solutions to avoid food insecurity, malnutrition and loss of income.”

Thanks to the Global Environment Fund (GEF), the funding partner of the project, FAO is putting a strong effort on supporting the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) priority to improve natural resource management through the landscape or watershed management (WSM) approach.

WSM is believed to be a powerful approach to address climate change impacts and improve climate change resilience of rural communities. It aims at conserving and managing soils, water, and plant resources of identified catchments, for the sustainable benefit of people livelihoods.

In close partnership with national and sub-national stakeholders and partners, the WSM approach of the LNP promotes activities that combine environmental, social, and economic concerns with an approach to slow water flows within the slopes and streams of the landscape, recharge groundwater, restore and replant forest, and support agriculture in an integrated manner.

After several years of implementation and interaction with stakeholders, the project has seen a need for mobilizing a broad range of stakeholders to be better exposed to the landscape or watershed management concept, its definitions, setting-up, steps, and how it works in an integrated fashion in a wider range and at the micro-scale using participatory processes. Therefore, the LNP has staged a national workshop, in which more than fifty participants from both national and sub-national offices and other development partners joined a four-day long workshop in Siem Reap province.

With this potential opportunity, the forum aims to improve participants understanding and foster knowledge sharing on the landscape approach. Key elements like the nexus or connections between forest and water, and the nexus between forest and food security and nutrition, with watershed management introduced as the method of implementation in the context of Climate Change Adaptation (CCA), were presented and debated. FAO experts presented the concepts, key elements and implementation procedures, definitions of technical terms, practical implementation steps, notably through FAO global, regional, and country-level case studies. The introduction to the landscape–WSM approach and its underlying elements is a good starting point for a CCA training and capacity building programme for the national and sub-national stakeholders involved in the current project, and in future Forest Land Restoration (FLR), as well as other related projects.

The workshop also introduced participants to LNP activities with field visits in target catchment areas in Siem Reap and Kampong Thom, for first-hand experience on how WSM is organized and managed.  More importantly, the participants formed focus groups allowing them to discuss ways forward and identify challenges to be addressed. The outcomes from the groups will contribute to the development of a multi-sectoral approach to provincial-level WSM, addressing climate change with improved community resilience, food security, and income. 

In her opening remark, Her Excellency, Prom Sophy, Undersecretary of State of Ministry of Environment (MoE), underlined the significance of the landscape approach for livelihood improvement, as well as environmental and natural resource management.  °The WSM approach of the Life and Nature Project has been supporting the implementation of policies and strategic frameworks of the MoE, particularly the Cambodia Climate Change Strategic Plan 2014-2023¨.

She further added, “The management of natural resources with a WSM approach offers great potential for improved adaptive capacity to climate change. Improving land and water management, putting in place proper capacity building at both institutional and individual level, and promoting greater investment in land and water resource management all directly contribute to that.”

Leveraging policies and planning frameworks to accelerate Climate Change Adaptation actions for improved food security

This national WSM workshop also directly serves as an entry point to the policy focus of the project, which aims at building adequate capacity among national stakeholders to integrate CCA actions into the agricultural and food security policies and planning.

Even though The RGC acknowledges potential impacts of climate change and have put in place national policies and programmes as well as key bodies, whose duties are to lead in policy establishment and coordination for battling the climate change impacts, there has been limited focus on the linkages between climate change, food security, forest, water, agriculture, fisheries, and improved rural livelihoods.

CCA implementation through WSM and the landscape approach can be a best vehicle to manage and sustain the supporting synergies between forest, water, agriculture, fisheries, food security and improved rural livelihoods.

A strong multi-sectoral institutional planning and cooperation effort is needed to bring about such inter-ministerial CCA WSM cooperation. Strong ministries and sub-national agencies are needed to deliver CCA and WSM action, and existing policies should be adequate to ensure this within the ministerial mandates. In other words, there is a need to develop a more integrated action plan and implementation guidance concerning the CCA WSM action at both national and provincial level. Such knowledge and tools should be fully accessible by local governments (provincial, municipal, commune) to help communities address climate change impacts.

A climate change specialist from the National Committee for Sub-National Democratic Development (NCDD), Mr Kong Chanthan, stated at the workshop, “The NCDD will make use of the good experience of FAO on WSM to prepare a policy and guidance on CCA action and implementation frameworks for the sub-national governments”. He added, “The NCDD will seek a collaboration with FAO to develop a proposal and mobilize support for the implementation of CCA actions.”

Mr Kong Chanthan also hoped to have a collaboration with FAO for capacity building activities, notably for sub-national level government, on the implementation of watershed management actions.

For the LNP, this forum is a first-step in stakeholder’s agency training and capacity building programme. This will continue into 2019 with other Climate Change Adaptation capacity building workshops and lessons learned events. All of these events will contribute to raise awareness and build consensus among stakeholders. Strengthening the capacity of government counterparts to address the climate change challenge for vulnerable livelihoods in rural areas, while ensuring a sustainable management of natural resources, will remain an important objective too.

Under the Ministry of Interior, the NCDD is the inter-ministerial mechanism for promoting democratic development through decentralization and deconcentration reforms in Cambodia. It is one of the national bodies tasked to design and coordinate national programs for implementation at sub-national levels. The NCDD is responsible for planning, investment, and monitoring for all commune level activities. This includes formulating the annual work plans and budgets for each commune. NCDD involvement for integrating climate change responses into any local level activity is crucial.