With the recognition, the national park in southern Vietnam officially become the the 72nd in the world and the second in Vietnam to achieve the distinction.
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| Cat Tien National Park achieves IUCN green list title. (Photo: The organizers) |
This is a big step forward in nature and biodiversity conservation in Vietnam. This result come after a comprehensive assessment process with support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through the Biodiversity Conservation Activity, a part of Sustainable Forest Management and Biodiversity Conservation Project (VFBC).
Van Ngoc Thinh, Country Director of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Vietnam, said that achieving the Green List title is clear evidence of significant progress in the park’s management over the past two years.
According to the International Organization for Conservation of Nature in Vietnam, Asia accounts for 50% of the number of national parks and protected areas recognized on the Green List globally. Vietnam is one of the first countries in Asia to join the Green List (since 2015), along with China and the Republic of Korea.
Cat Tien National Park, established in 1978 and spanning more than 82,000 hectares in the provinces of Dong Nai, Lam Dong and Binh Phuoc, is home to 1,729 animal species from 238 families and more than 1,600 plant species from 710 families, including some rare species such as Asian elephants, gaurs, black-shanked douc langurs, Javan pangolins and Siamese crocodiles.
Many years of work has been done to put Cat Tien National Park on the IUCN Green List. Its journey towards this distinction begins with an assessment of conservation measures, including protecting endangered species and preserving the diversity of its ecosystem. The National Park has implemented biodiversity monitoring, habitat restoration and species conservation projects.
The Green List is a set of metrics measuring conservation success, initiated at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in 2016.
To be included in this list, conservation sites must meet 17 criteria with 50 indicators. Over 300 conservation sites from 60 countries have applied./.