Angkor Archaeological Park — Heritage Tourism Revenue Funding Forest & Hydraulic Restoration (Cambodia)

The Angkor Archaeological Park in Siem Reap, Cambodia, UNESCO-listed since 1992, is as much a hydraulic landscape as a monumental one: its temples, including Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, depend on the water table maintained by an ancient network of barays (reservoirs) and moats, and on surrounding forest cover that regulates runoff and stabilises the sandy soils the temple foundations sit on. The APSARA National Authority, Cambodia's state body for the site, has run hydraulic restoration works since 2005, refilling and maintaining reservoirs such as Srah Srang and the Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat moats; academic monitoring of the North Baray recorded stored water volumes rising from about 700,000 cubic metres in 2008 to roughly 5,000,000 cubic metres a year by 2011-2013, and APSARA ran a further groundwater-recharge and flood-mitigation project across the park from 2014 to 2018.

Since 2015, APSARA and partner organisations — including the NGO Archaeology and Development Foundation (ADF), active in the Phnom Kulen area — have run reforestation programmes to protect the park's soil and hydrology; ADF alone reports having planted trees across roughly 220 hectares since 2015, and separate APSARA-led plantings covering some 800 hectares and around 100,000 trees have been reported in the Banteay Srei district and Phnom Kulen, alongside larger annual tree-distribution campaigns. Foreign-visitor ticket sales to the park, managed by the state enterprise Angkor Enterprise, generated about $11.5 million in 2022 and, as international tourism recovered, around $37 million in 2023 from nearly 800,000 foreign visitors — revenue that funds APSARA's operating budget, within which this conservation and reforestation work sits.

The available sources document real, quantified hydraulic and reforestation activity and a large, growing tourism revenue base, but they do not establish a transparent, fixed earmark of ticket revenue specifically for forest or water-system conservation, nor an independent impact evaluation isolating what share of the temples' structural stability is attributable to these works as opposed to separately funded conservation projects (such as the long-running German Apsara Conservation Project). The practice is best read as a heritage site whose growing tourism income coexists with, and plausibly helps sustain, an active but administratively fragmented set of nature-based conservation efforts, rather than a single, audited payment-for-ecosystem-services scheme.

As a nature-based, cultural-heritage practice, Angkor shows how heritage-tourism revenue and ecosystem restoration can be structurally linked at large scale, with credible, specific hydrological monitoring data, but the funding pathway between ticket sales and conservation spending is not transparently quantified in public sources, and reforestation reporting is fragmented across several actors rather than tracked as a single programme.

Read the full analysis: https://apsaraauthority.gov.kh/