Forbes has named Khao Yai among the Top Spots For Southeast Asian Ecotourism.

Khao Yai was featured in the top ten picks not just for it’s World Heritage listed forests and amazing biodiversity, but also as a place to learn about “regional ecology and conservation efforts.”

The PeunPa Foundation’s community outreach work in villages around the park was noted as a highlight for eco conscious travellers wanting to see and learn about forest conservation in action.

PeunPa is guiding sustainable development projects in several villages that border Khao Yai, to help former poachers become forest protectors.

Every year, park rangers make a pledge to the spirits of Khao Yai at a sacred ceremony in the forest. They promise not to hunt, kill or consume wild animals, and to protect the park from those that would.

Rangers also ask the spirits of Khao Yai to protect them from danger while on patrol. If any ranger was to break their promise to the spirits, it is said they will be cursed with a tragedy within 5-10 days that could also hurt others on the same patrol.

The spirits of Khao Yai are believed to have a connection with a community that settled in Dong Phayayen - Khao Yai and lived in harmony with the forest a long time ago.

The PeunPa Foundation, which also trains Khao Yai’s rangers, is working with the village communities that live around the park today to help them develop a more sustainable relationship with the forest and provide real alternatives to poaching from the park.

Kuman killed them all. You name it, tigers, wild boars, gibbons, or elephants. While he was hunting in Khao Yai, he would also carve out selected parts of aloe wood trees – valuable aromatic resin wood used to make perfume and incense. The animals and aloe wood Kuman took from the park are protected species, but that didn’t deter him. His story is an environmentalist’s nightmare, and he was not alone.

Thousands of villagers like Kuman, in more than a hundred communities around Khao Yai, are still hunting and poaching illegally in the park. Often enough, the reason is poverty. As a poacher, Kuman could make a month’s salary in a single day if he caught a tiger, or earn easy money selling aloe wood.

The terrible impact of poaching on Khao Yai’s biodiversity has quickly become apparent. Few tigers survive in the park and some species are already extinct, such as Schomburgk’s Deer – Khao Yai’s emblem. The dwindling number of animals has forced poachers to cut more and more aloe wood from the park. Distilling factories have sprung up around Khao Yai to process the wood into oil, destined for the Middle East and other parts of the world. If nothing is done, it’s estimated that there might not be an aloe wood tree left in the forest within a decade.

PeunPa’s approach to protecting Khao Yai doesn’t ignore the human side to this story. While supporting rangers in their patrolling work, PeunPa’s Community Outreach team is helping villagers develop a more sustainable relationship with the forest.

With this support, Kuman is now heading up an organic communal farm in his village, instead of a poaching gang. Producing fish, mushrooms and other vegetables for sale at local markets, the farm is self-reliant and profitable. It supports 17 families who would have otherwise relied on poaching. Kuman not only halted his village’s reliance on poaching, but has become a trainer in sustainable farming and speaker against poaching.

To reduce local reliance on logging for fuel wood, PeunPa is helping Kok Sa-ard Village, just north of Khao Yai National Park, build a biogas unit.

This pilot community outreach project demonstrates the economic and environmental benefits of switching to more sustainable energy sources.

Using only manure and water, the biogas unit will provide villagers with a cheap, sustainable energy source for cooking and light. It will help villagers save money on petrol and also prevent deforestation. PeunPa hopes the switch to biogas energy can be replicated in other villages around Khao Yai.

This pilot project was made possible with support from the Blue Moon Fund and other PeunPa donors.

Having grown up on a farm in Australia, I know life in rural areas can be tough. The villages around Khao Yai National Park don’t have to deal with the bushfires and drought that occur in Australia, but these people often struggle to make a living.

For subsistence farmers with few opportunities to earn money legally, poaching timber and wildlife from the nearby park was always tempting.

The PeunPa Foundation is working to change this by helping these communities develop sustainable agriculture projects, such as fish and mushroom farming. The income from these projects means villagers don’t have to poach from the park to survive. As a volunteer with PeunPa, I had the chance to see these efforts first hand.

My visit to the villages around Khao Yai was an eye-opening experience. PeunPa’s community projects are providing a sense of pride and hope I could see in the faces of the villagers as they showed me their fish ponds and mushroom propagation huts. The projects may be small scale right now, but they’ve already helped change attitudes towards the forest. With the right support, they can do a lot more.