Cambodia’s biggest lake is running dry

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From National Geographic

Hun Sotharith recalls when he moved to Cambodia’s Tonle Sap to become a fisherman. It was the early 1990s, and the lake's freshwater swamp forest where he fished was so dense that it could take Sotharith, a former soldier, a day and a half to find the way back to his floating village.

Back then, during the six-month rainy season, the vast wetland became a place to feed, breed, and hide for a wide diversity of fish, including the critically endangered Mekong giant catfish. “Everywhere was forest, and fish was abundant,” says Sotharith.

Today, only remnants of that forested water world remain in Koh Chivang, the five-village district on the northwestern end of the lake where Sotharith is now deputy chief. A fire in the 2016 dry season burned 80 percent of the district’s flooded forest, destroying critical fish habitat and causing many of the 13,000 residents, who live in floating houses, to abandon fishing; they now grow chili and other crops.

A similar story plays out around Tonle Sap, Southeast Asia’s largest lake and the center of the world’s most productive inland fishery. In many places, where native forest once grew from the lakebed, drab, dry, treeless farmland—yet to be inundated by the floodwaters that in recent years have arrived late—now stretches as far as the eye can see. Fires, often lit deliberately to clear land for agriculture, has further reduced the flooded forest.

Many conservationists now warn that Tonle Sap, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, faces an existential threat. Further deforestation and environmental degradation have the potential to inflict devastating economic damage to the nearly one million Cambodians living around the lake and the many millions more who depend on it for fish—the country’s primary source of protein.

While other areas, such as Prey Lang, a nature reserve in central Cambodia and one of Southeast Asia’s last remaining lowland evergreen woodlands, have suffered high deforestation—often because of illegal logging underpinned by government corruption—the greatest loss proportionally has occurred in the Tonle Sap floodplain forest, according to a study published recently in the journal Water. It shows a 31 percent loss of flooded forest since 1993.

Continues with maps and photos

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/cambodia-tonle-sap-lake-running-dry-taking-flooded-forest-fish/