Officials interacting with participants during the workshop. ©FAO/ Vann Chivorn

From 19-21 December 2023, the Forestry Administration of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, the Ministry of Environment (MoE), the UN-REDD Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) jointly organized the Projects Completion Workshop on the ‘UN-REDD initiative on improving sustainable forest trade in the Lower Mekong Region’ and the ‘Restoration for Resilience and Recovery (3R)’.

This workshop marked the completion of implementation of two projects, which among their objectives aimed at promoting better management and restoration of degraded forest landscapes to enable communities to grow their productive resource base, reverse forest loss and degradation and facilitate local recovery and resilience in Cambodia.

Forests are critical to the well-being of rural communities and Indigenous Peoples as they provide crucial products and services in support of local livelihoods and resilience during times of crisis.

Key discussions and agreements at the workshop focused on the following activities which were implemented under the projects:

• Technical training on the use of the SE.Plan, which Forestry Administration and Ministry of Environment staff received under the Restoration for Resilience and Recovery project. The SE.Plan is a tool employed to support assessment of degradation and mapping of forest restoration opportunities.
• Progress on the development of a forest certification system for Cambodia with one of the next steps identified being, awareness raising, dissemination, consultation with wider stakeholders on forest certification and the benefits of forest certification.
• Forest monitoring where a key agreement was to provide technical support to community forestry on how to achieve sustainable and legal timber harvesting, how to manage forests sustainably and also to enhance their overall capacity. In addition, the need to operationalize the forest monitoring system at different scales was highlighted as a way forward.

The workshop was held at the Sofitel Phnom Penh Phokeethra Hotel in Cambodia’s capital city of Phnon Penh. Up to 90 participants from the forestry sector took part, representing Government ministries including MoE, MAFF, Ministry of Industry, Science, Technology and Innovation, civil society, the private sector, community members. The workshop had virtual participation from stakeholders in Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam and in terms of interaction, there was sharing of results, outputs, lessons learned and experiences of project implementation in Cambodia.