Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project — Verified Forest-Carbon Payments and Contested Community Impacts (Cambodia)

The Southern Cardamom REDD+ project, jointly run since 2015 by the US-based NGO Wildlife Alliance and Cambodia's Ministry of Environment, covers a 465,000-hectare forest concession in the Cardamom Mountains of southwest Cambodia. Under the Verra VCS standard, the project sells carbon credits generated by avoided deforestation.

The project reports 27.6 million tonnes of CO2e in verified avoided emissions to date and the protection of 442,870 hectares of forest inside a national park.

The project is also a documented cautionary case. In February 2024, Human Rights Watch published 'Carbon Offsetting's Casualties', an investigation finding that rangers and officials linked to the project had destroyed crops, dismantled homes and restricted land access for Indigenous Chong communities who have lived in the Cardamoms for generations. Verra suspended credit sales from the project on 19 June 2023 pending review, and reinstated it in September 2024 after a roughly 14-month suspension, but HRW's lead investigator publicly disputed the review's independence, stating Verra 'didn't interview a single victim of this project' and that its report 'simply restates the assertions of the Wildlife Alliance'. As of March 2025, Mongabay reported continuing tension between Indigenous residents and project management over unresolved land claims and restricted access. The case illustrates a recurring tension in forest-carbon PES: strong, third-party-verified emissions data can coexist with weak, contested safeguards for the communities whose land underpins the credits — a pattern this catalogue records honestly rather than omitting.