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 depend on the water table maintained by an ancient network of barays (reservoirs) and moats and on surrounding forest cover that stabilises the sandy soils the temple foundations sit on.

The APSARA National Authority has run hydraulic restoration works since 2005, refilling reservoirs such as Srah Srang and the Angkor Thom/Angkor Wat moats, and since 2015 APSARA and partners including the NGO Archaeology and Development Foundation have run reforestation programmes to protect the park's soil and hydrology.

Academic monitoring of the North Baray recorded stored water rising from about 700,000 cubic metres in 2008 to roughly 5,000,000 cubic metres a year by 2011-2013; ADF alone reports planting trees across roughly 220 hectares since 2015, with separate APSARA-led plantings of about 800 hectares and 100,000 trees reported elsewhere in the park. Foreign-visitor ticket revenue rose from about $11.5 million in 2022 to around $37 million in 2023, funding APSARA's operating budget within which this work sits.

The available sources document real, quantified hydraulic and reforestation activity, but do not establish a transparent, fixed earmark of ticket revenue for conservation, nor an independent impact evaluation isolating these works' contribution to temple structural stability — this is best read as a heritage site whose tourism income coexists with, and plausibly helps sustain, an administratively fragmented set of conservation efforts rather than a single audited payment-for-ecosystem-services scheme.