Thai plan to redraw boundaries of tiger reserve sparks concern and criticism

Government plans to remove protections for a portion of Thailand’s Thap Lan National Park, a core area within one of mainland Southeast Asia’s last intact tracts of forest, could trigger knock-on consequences for protected areas across the country, conservationists warn.

Thap Lan National Park is one of the most ecologically rich parts of a network of five protected areas that together form the Dong Phayayen-Khao Yai Forest Complex (DPKY-FC), a green expanse of steep, forested hills bisecting Thailand’s intensively developed plains to the northeast of Bangkok. The DPKY Forest Complex was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005 for its exceptional biodiversity, and Thap Lan itself was designated a national park in 1981.

New proposals to issue title deeds for land within the reserve’s boundaries come from the prime ministers’ office, which says the process is necessary to settle historic boundary disputes with local communities who were living in the area long before it was established as a national park, according to local media reports.

However, conservation groups and Thailand’s Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation (DNP) have slammed the initiative, saying it would effectively remove 42,000 hectares (104,000 acres), roughly equivalent to one-fifth, of currently protected land from the iconic reserve. A recent public hearing process led by the DNP has led to widespread public criticism of the plans.

A hotspot of conservation hope

Besides its role as a central component of the DPKY-FC World Heritage Site, Thap Lan National Park is perhaps best known as the home of one of Thailand’s two remaining breeding populations of Indochinese tigers (Panthera tigris corbetti). Driven extinct in nearby Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam by habitat loss, poaching and overhunting of prey species, tigers hang on eastern Thailand in Thap Lan. Surveys in 2020 estimated roughly 20 tigers live in the Thap Lan-Pang Sida Tiger Conservation Landscape, making this corner of the DPKY-FC the sole hope of tiger recovery in this part of Thailand.

Thap Lan National Park is also crucial for conserving Thailand’s largest terrestrial resident: the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus). The national park’s forests sustain the country’s second-largest population of the megaherbivores after the reserves that make up the country’s Western Forest Complex, close to the border with Myanmar.

Moreover, in part due to strong investment in ranger patrols and protection through the DNP, many other species, such as Indochinese leopards, gaurs, bantengs, hornbills and several species of gibbons continue to inhabit the forest complex.

A worrying precedent

Critics of the land reform plans say they’re particularly worried that carving up such a significant portion of a key national park could set a precedent for similar action in other protected areas in Thailand, a trend that could see a reduction in the land area managed for conservation at a time when Thailand has committed to area-based global biodiversity goals, including protecting 30% of the country’s land, freshwater and marine areas by 2030.

The Seub Nakhasathien Foundation, a Bangkok-based NGO, says the removal of protected status from parts of Thap Lan National Park could undermine efforts by Thailand’s tiger specialists to restore the big cats to neighboring Khao Yai National Park, a conservation goal that in part spurred the recent construction of a multimillion-dollar wildlife corridor spanning a major highway through the area.

The interface between the two flagship national parks is not just important for tigers, Ornyupa Sangkamarn, head of academic affairs at the foundation, told Mongabay in an email. “Many types of wildlife cross between the forests, such as elephants, (gaurs), serows, deer, barking deer, leopard cats, dhole, clouded leopard and Asian black bear … in the area that will be revoked,” Ornyupa said. “Connecting the forest (corridor) may not be successful” should the revocations go ahead.

Earlier this week, a coalition of international NGOs operating in Thailand issued an open letter to the minister of environment calling on government agencies to reconsider the proposals. The letter, issued by the Thailand offices of WWF, WCS, Panthera and Freeland, says the revocation of national park land “threatens the ecological integrity of the Forest Complex for generations to come, and sets a troubling precedent, empowering parties opposed to natural area protection to advocate for similar actions elsewhere.”

In the letter, the NGOs urge officials to “do no harm” to the national park in their efforts to strike a balance between environmental protection, community rights and commercial interests. “Moving forward with a degazettement of this scale will undoubtedly jeopardize Thailand’s well-earned status as the regional leader in biodiversity conservation,” the letter says, “and would clearly be counter to the nation’s commitments under the Convention on Biological Diversity.”

Multiple land claims

Meanwhile, local communities and legal experts say the government must press ahead with plans to resolve the land conflicts, which they say stems from oversights made during the initial demarcation of the reserve boundary in 1981, when authorities encompassed land historically inhabited and farmed by local communities within the reserve boundaries.

Provisions under Thailand’s National Park Act and the Wildlife Protection and Reservation Act require the government to accommodate sustainable local community livelihoods within protected area management. While surveys, consultations and mapping programs to resolve the disputes in Thap Lan have been ongoing for decades, the situation is yet to be resolved. In 2000, a new reserve boundary was drafted following joint mapping surveys and consultations between communities and government agencies, but it never passed into law due to mapping discrepancies between government agencies and successive administrations.

Pornpana Kuaycharoen, founder and coordinator of Land Watch Thai, said a lot of land conflict occurs in Thailand because community rights are typically overlooked by a land tenure system focused on state and private interests. “When the national park was designated, the communities were ignored by the state,” she said. “When (national park authorities) announced the conservation area, they enclosed the villages, so the inhabitants were immediately breaking the law.”

According to Pornpana, in addition to land historically inhabited by villagers in the northwest of Thap Lan National Park, sections of the northeast and western reserve margin are also under consideration to be axed from the reserve. The state gave plots within this area to landless farmers under historical amnesty agreements issued during the 1970s, she said.

“These disputed lands are not forest,” Pornpana said. “(They are) forestry concessions that were granted a long time ago, that means the trees were cut long ago. It is inhabited villages and farmland,” she said, adding that villagers are not cutting the forest, merely trying to make a living on their land.

Ornyupa said she and her colleagues at Seub Nakhasathien are not against restoring land rights to villagers and farmers who were living in the area prior to the park’s designation or who have legitimate claims to the land. However, the foundation noted that records indicate these lands amount to roughly 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres), less than one-quarter of the land in question.

According to Ornyupa, much of the remainder of the land under consideration was forest as recently as two decades ago, when the 2000 reserve boundaries were marked. Now, it has been built on by “outside developers” who have found ways of bypassing regulations that restrict the sale and exchange of state-protected land, she said.

Prawatsart Chanthep, superintendent of Thap Lan National Park, said the DNP has lodged a total of 552 ongoing lawsuits against such developers who have constructed tourism ventures and resorts on land within the reserve boundaries. He said he’s concerned that if the government grants land titles to such developers, it will make it very difficult to control such expansion within the reserve. In other words, the proposals undermine DNP staff’s capacity to manage the site for conservation.

Both Ornyupa and Prawatsart said that treating such recently encroached land with the same procedures to resolve the long-standing disputes with communities who have legitimate claims to land within the park could backfire. It could effectively legitimize claims to land that has been illegally developed. “It is well-known that if the legal conditions of the area are changed, it will be more difficult to control these developers,” Prawatsart said.

“It will become a domino for other conservation areas, with people making claims like this instead of (facing) legal consequences,” Ornyupa said, adding that dealing with land that comprises important wildlife corridors like Thap Lan National Park in this way is “a pathway to endless human-wildlife conflict.”

Prawatsart said the DNP acknowledges that villagers were living in the area prior to the existence of Thap Lan National Park, “but not as much as at present.” He called for further surveys to map and control legitimate historical village and farm plots as well as “thorough examination of the qualifications of land plot holders (in order) to consider granting rights as appropriate.”

Of utmost importance is closing loopholes that currently enable land to change hands and be sold, he said. This is crucial to ensure land remains as farmland under the management of legitimate holders, rather than being converted to private developments.

“If the boundary of Thap Lan National Park has to be redetermined, it must be in accordance with the rules and principles of Thai law,” he said. “The benefits (should) go to the real people in order to provide a correct guideline for managing forest protected areas in Thailand.”

World Heritage implications

Conservation NGOs as well as campaigners at Seub Nakhasathien say that, ultimately, the land reforms could endanger the DPKY Forest Complex’s World Heritage status, which is due for review by UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee in 2025. They say that axing such a substantial portion of the national park might not only raise concerns from the committee over the conservation value of the site, but could also negatively impact its willingness to approve future world heritage site proposals from Thailand.

According to Mizuki Murai, a senior coordinator for the IUCN World Heritage Team, the conservation body that provides technical advice to the World Heritage Committee, the 2025 assessment will take into account several factors that pose threats to the DPKY landscape, including tourism infrastructure development, agricultural encroachment, road construction, illegal logging and poaching.

When the park was first inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2005, the Thai government indicated that it had plans to adjust the boundaries, excluding 43,773 hectares (108,165 acres) of degraded land while bringing an additional 17,727 hectares (43,804 acres) of forest reserves into the complex. But these boundary shifts were never finalized.

Murai said the current plant to excise land from Thap Lan National Park likely relates to those 2005 plans, but the IUCN team hasn’t yet received a formal proposal. Such a proposal would have to follow strict guidelines under the World Heritage Convention to avoid triggering a downgrading of the DPKY-FC to inscription on the “List of World Heritage in Danger,” she said.

“All areas within a World Heritage site are required under the Convention to have adequate legal protection and be effectively managed, and there are a range of different expectations set out in the Convention and its Operational Guidelines,” Murai told Mongabay in an email. “Therefore, any proposal to amend the boundary of protected areas within a World Heritage site should firstly be considered by the World Heritage Committee before any such changes are made at the national level.”

In 2023, the World Heritage Committee ruled that the boundary adjustments in discussion at the time constituted a “significant boundary modification” under the convention. Accordingly, the government of Thailand would be expected to make such a submission, Murai said. “The evaluation of a significant boundary modification by IUCN is a thorough process, including a field visit, consultations on site, and desk reviews,” she added.

Carolyn Cowan is a staff writer for Mongabay. Follow her on 𝕏, @CarolynCowan11.

Banner image: Wildlife rangers on patrol deep in Thap Lan national park search for illegal Siamese rosewood loggers. Photo by Demelza Stokes.

See related story:

Thap Lan: Thailand’s unsung forest gem under threat, but still abrim with life

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