Environmental Protection Societies, CBIRD Sub Tai

CBIRD Sub Tai is a community-based organization that operates in six villages in North Eastern Thailand along the southern border of the Khao Yai National Park - Thailand's oldest national park, which contains many endangered animals (elephants, gibbons, tigers, leopards, and sun bears). The group has created Environmental Protection Societies (EPSs) to resolve local issues of poverty and environmental degradation, including indebtedness and farming techniques for steep slopes. To combat unsustainable encroachment into national forests and high levels of indebtedness (due to middlemen charging high interest rates), Sub Tai instituted one of the first Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDP) in Thailand that aimed to raise villager awareness about the environment and convince villagers to self-manage and self-regulate protection of the park. By creating buffer zones, links between biodiversity and the surrounding human populations have been preserved and hundreds of hectares have been replanted with native tree species. Through the operation of the EPS, illegal logging and hunting have been reduced by more than three quarters and the exploitation of protected areas has been almost eliminated, thus giving renewed lease of life to the endangered fauna and flora of this unique tropical ecosystem.

This teaching case is available here.

Published by Convention on Biological Diversity.