Tha Soun’s orange robe shimmers as he strolls through a patch of forest in Northern Cambodia, pointing out trees and shrubs with medicinal benefits. He gestures toward berries that he says are good for joint and muscle pain, and a beehive full of nutritious wild honey.

Tha and his fellow monks from nearby Samraong pagoda have presided over this 44-thousand acre forest known as Sorng Rukavorn, or simply Monk Forest, for a decade. These days it seems a serene garden, but it wasn’t always so.

Tha says that not long ago, police and soldiers would come here to poach timber.

“I would advise them to stop if I thought they might listen,” Tha says. “But if they wouldn’t listen, I would just take away their chainsaws and weapons.”

Tha says he and the other members of his Buddhist community have succeeded in protecting the forest because they are respected spiritual figures. But his experience before he became a monk certainly helps as well.

“The soldiers don’t scare me, because I used to be a soldier, too,” Tha says.

This determination helps preserve the forest for use by both the monks and the local community. Now, the effort could also provide lucrative for Cambodia.

Monk Forest is one of 13 community forests totaling more than 250 square miles in Odder Meanchey province whose value in fighting climate change is being marketed in an international exchange of what are called avoided deforestation carbon credits. That’s a mouthful that basically means Cambodia hopes to get paid by outsiders not to cut down their trees.

The credit market is based on the fact that forests absorb huge amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide. The effort is meant to help curb rising CO2 levels by preserving as much forest land as possible.

Tha acknowledges that climate science is new to the monks here, but he does understand that with climate change a lot is at stake for his country, because most people here survive off the land.

And Tha says preserving forests has always been important in Buddhist tradition.

“It was under a tree that Buddha was born, achieved enlightenment and passed away,” Tha says.

So like Buddha, Tha spends much of his time in ritualized performances under the forest canopy.

But such natural temples have become harder to find in Cambodia. More than a fifth of the country’s forests have been cut down over the past twenty years.

Today, large-scale logging has been reduced but big timber sales continue, even in protected areas. Tha says when that happens, local people can no longer get any benefits from the forest,

Here in Monk Forest, on the other hand, local residents can still share its abundance. And they also help monitor and protect the forest.

34-year-old volunteer Choun Chun says the monks have taught him about the value of conservation.

“When I was young, I was tempted to cut the trees for profit,” Choun says. “But, slowly, I realized the forest was important for our society. If we cut the trees, we destroy ourselves.”

Destruction has been widespread in the area in recent decades. Oddar Meanchey province was the hideout of remnants of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime for almost 20 years after they were overthrown in the mid 1970s. In those years they funded their insurgency by selling timber in nearby Thailand.

Today, the area remains poor and isolated, which makes illegal logging tempting. The carbon credit deal is meant to address this by essentially offering a reward for protecting the forest. By one estimate, the credits for all 13 forests could be worth as much as 50 million dollars over 30 years.

But the carbon credit process is largely untested, and critics worry it could be vulnerable to corruption. Kuy Thourn, who’s a local leader in a village near Monk Forest, says he’s not sure his community will ever see any benefit.

Thourn says the money might go to the people, or it might go to corrupt officials.

“We will have to find out.”

A government representative recently visited the area to assure villagers that they will benefit from the deal. But skepticism is rampant, and monk Tha Soun worries that it will be difficult to convince some Cambodians of the importance of protecting their forests. But he says he remains committed, no matter what.

“I decided to become a monk because we Cambodians believe it is the duty of some boys to keep the religion alive and clean the sins of our parents,” Tha says.

For Tha, those sins include the past generation’s mistreatment of the forest. He says he’s determined to help save Song Rukavorn, and as much forest land here in northern Cambodia, as he can, for sustainable use, and spiritual contemplation.

Google’s “Street View” project has received some bad publicity in the past and some have accused the internet giant of invading their privacy. But in this case, Google says locals invited the company in. An Amazonian conservation group says it hopes the project will bring global attention to the challenges of climate change, deforestation and poverty in the region.

Check out the slideshow from Google about its Amazon project.

Here’s a little video on the tricycle that Google will use in the Amazon

Bulldozers in Paraguay © GAT/ Survival International

“This is a large, flat lowland basic to the south of the Amazon which used to be called the green Hell because it’s was such thick inpenetrable forest but of course the many indigenous peoples who live there didn’t see it as a Hell at all them obviously it was just home”.

Recent satellite images show cattle ranchers moving in and that’s forcing indigenous people out.

Where in South America are we?

The answer is the Chaco region of northern Paraguay. Anchor Marco Werman hears from Survival International’s Jonathan Mazower about new satellite images that document deforestation of the Chaco region, home to the only uncontacted Indian groups outside the Amazon basin.

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Survival International

• The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institution (STRI)
• Alex Gallafent’s Amazon stories (2008)

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: There’s some interesting environmental news to report out of South America. And it’s good environmental news, for a change. Large-scale deforestation in the Amazon rainforest fell dramatically last year. Brazil’s environment agency, responsible for protecting the forests against illegal logging, says one big reason for the drop is increased use of satellite data to crack down on loggers. Dr. William Laurance is a research associate with the Smithsonian Institution and has studied the Amazon for 15 years. He describes what’s been happening in Brazil.

WILLIAM LAURANCE:  We’ve seen deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon drop from around two and a half million hectares a year, which in [INDISCERNABLE] terms is about ten football fields a minute or almost one Belgium a year, down to about 700,000 hectares a year, this year, which is about three football fields a minute. So, it’s a better picture and, of course, one of the big questions is what exactly is responsible for that?

WERMAN:  And what do you think is responsible for that?

LAURANCE: The Brazilian government crackdown is certainly part of this and we’ve seen some big illegal timber chains that have been broken up. So that kind of thing tends to send a bit of a ripple of fear across illegal loggers and illegal land clearers in the Amazon. And also there’s been other kinds of crackdowns. There’s been an American nun, Dorothy Stang, was actually murdered in the Amazon by a cattle rancher a few years ago and this resulted in a huge political fallout and a big embarrassment for the Lula government. And President Lula actually sent the army in as a result of that. So I think that contributed. Most people who are watching this, however, also see a big role for basically the slowdown in the global economy. Commodity prices for things like beef and timber and soy are down. In the past, we’ve seen that, for example, the frequency of forest fires goes way up in areas where there’s a lot of soy production when soy prices go up. So, I think most people are kind of holding their breath right now and thinking that when the global economy picks back up, we may in fact see another big spike in Amazon deforestation.

WERMAN: So, how does Brazil and other governments, how do they take these lessons with kind of connection between deforestation and the sluggish economy, try to reproduce them without harming their own economies in the future or is this just a short-term thing?

LAURANCE: Well, it does create a challenge for a tropical countries that are trying to slow down deforestation. And again I think we have to give a lot of credit to Brazil. Other countries around the world, for example, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Cambodia, some of the countries in Africa, are still really struggling with high rates of deforestation and so I think we have to give credit to country’s like Brazil and say, look, they’ve made real progress, but, of course, we’re really waiting with our – holding our breath hoping that the deforestation rates don’t go back up.

WERMAN: Now, tell us about this new satellite data. How are satellites actually saving the rainforests right now?

LAURANCE: The big thing is that they’re being done in real time and so there’s, you know, if someone goes out and starts knocking down the forest, if you’ve got a satellite sensor that’s not passing over very frequently or it’s of a coarse resolution, that’s not very much use. But the idea is that you’ve got these higher resolution satellites, a lot of them are covering places like the Amazon on a daily basis. And then the key thing, of course, is getting that information down to ground stations and it has to then be tied into a computerized geographic system in which you know who owns what land and if you see a fire over there, is that legal burning or is that illegal burning? Are they supposed to be knocking down the forest over there? So, Brazil has made a lot of progress in sort of trying to set up this framework. It’s linking the computers with people on the ground and linking those people on the ground with the enforcement agencies and so tying all that together, it’s a pretty impressive thing and again, I think we have to credit the Brazilians for their progress here.

WERMAN: So the Amazon is considered, you know, often said to be the Earth’s lungs and the calculus goes as the tropical rainforests are denuded, there’s less output of crucial oxygen for animals and humans. Does this research mean that it’s all okay now?

LAURANCE: No, we’re still losing a lot of tropical forest. We’re probably knocking down about ten million hectares a year or about three Belgium’s a year of tropical forest and that’s spewing about five billion tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which, of course, is worsening global warming. So, a big chunk of our problem right now, global warming, is a consequence of rapid razing and destruction of tropical forests. So, the situation is definitely improving in Brazil, but again we’re waiting to see what happens with commodity prices, whether forest rates, destruction rates, will go back up. But there’s still lots of other parts of the world where they’re knocking it down very fast. So we’ve won one battle here, but the war is far from over.

WERMAN:  Dr. William Laurance, a research associate with the Smithsonian Institution and he’s a professor at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia. Thank you very much for your time indeed.

LAURANCE: Pleasure, Marco.

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Click on the image at right to view more of Ari’s photos from Indonesia.