Each year, northern Thailand struggles with choking haze caused by crop burning and forest fires, taking a severe toll on human health. Over the past two decades, a group of women in Lampang province have taken action to improve their local environment and curb sources of haze by restoring their local community forest.
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Members of the community forest group chat on their way to inspect a check dam. Image by Carolyn Cowan/Mongabay.
“Look at these ones over here!” calls Chamran Tahpan, as she crouches next to a mound of damp leaves on the forest floor. A cluster of mushrooms sprouts from the center of the earthy-smelling pile.
“These are hed khon, termite mushrooms,” says Rachaprapa Kamphud, 55, who leads the Ban Pong community forest and fire management group in northern Thailand’s Lampang province. Edible mushrooms like hed khon, along with a variety of other nontimber products, such as bamboo shoots, leafy greens and red ant eggs, can fetch high prices in local markets, she says, offering villagers a modest income.
By keeping the forest soil moist using small check dams designed to slow the flow of minor streams, Rachaprapa says they need only pile up humid leaves and soil to yield wild mushrooms year-round. There’s no need to set fire to the leaf litter to stimulate their growth — a common but risky method many nearby communities rely on.
“The moist fallen leaves are a natural fertilizer and give the trees the nutrients they need to grow tall,” Rachaprapa says as she leads 10 members of the community forest group — eight of them women — through the trees to harvest edible items and carry out repairs to a newly built check dam. “Even in the dry season, there’s moisture in our forest soil.”
Rachaprapa and her fellow volunteers began restoring the 40-hectare (100-acre) forest from a peanut plantation in 2007. They planted native trees and revived the water table by building structures known as check dams in areas where water naturally flows, but dries up seasonally. Measuring roughly 3-5 meters across and a meter high (10-16 by 3 feet), each of the now more than 300 check dams they’ve built is made from concrete, stones and compacted earth. Over the years, as moisture returned to the soils, natural regeneration has taken over, speeding the forest’s recovery.
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Rachaprapa Kamphud leads the Ban Pong community forest and fire management group. Image by Carolyn Cowan/Mongabay.
The small but passionate group take it upon themselves to maintain the community forest nestled between teak plantations, farmland and Ban Pong village, home to roughly 7,100 people.
Much of the year, this means protecting it against fire by patrolling regularly, maintaining the dams, and creating firebreaks.
The team also operate a wildfire alert system that has gained recognition as a vital rapid response system helping villagers across the region manage seasonal fires. Based on satellite monitoring and simple tools like walkie-talkies and social media, the early-warning system ensures everyone can be involved in tackling fires.
“When we started out, people were often surprised when they saw women like me venture out to extinguish blazes carrying heavy equipment,” Rachaprapa says, pointing to sizeable tools like ventilation blowers and fire beaters. “But when they saw how effective we could be, our reputation grew.”
Grassroots efforts like Ban Pong’s are vital for filling in broader fire management gaps. Communities can often mobilize much more quickly than government agencies and typically know the location of high-risk spots, says Marina Tornorsam, regional project manager of community-based fire management at RECOFTC, an NGO that supports community forestry and sustainable forest management. Local teams “can start putting out fires or alerting others immediately,” she says.
“What stands out about Ban Pong is how they include everyone in wildfire prevention,” Tornorsam adds. “Women and youth are actively involved, not just watching from the sidelines … Their commitment to working together and willingness to share what works makes a real difference.”
On call to respond to fires throughout the dry season from early February to May, Rachaprapa and her team are often asked to help put out fires in neighboring districts. The group also spread awareness of the benefits of wildfire management through workshops, exchanges and hands-on training for other communities and overseas students.
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Location of the Ban Pong Community Forest in the Ngao district of Lampang province in Thailand. Map by Andrés Alegría/Mongabay.
Human health toll spurs action on forests
Ban Pong village lies within the Ngao Model Forest, a government initiative established in 1964 to promote sustainable forest management. Spanning 175,159 hectares (432,827 acres), the landscape includes teak plantations, villages, 58 community forests, and national parks protecting watershed forests crucial for farmland irrigation.
Today, the area is included in the International Model Forest Network (IMFN), a global platform based in Canada that connects communities in more than 30 countries to share best practices in sustainable landscape-level forest restoration.
Through the network, Ban Pong shares knowledge on community-based fire prevention and women’s leadership with the aim of reducing wildfires on a larger scale.
Fire prevention is crucial. Each year, northern Thailand is smothered in thick haze caused by crop burning and forest fires, many of them set on purpose but quickly spiraling out of control. The fires don’t just harm the environments they burn, they also take a severe toll on human health.
Of chief concern are levels of PM2.5, a class of airborne pollutants released by fires that are so fine that they can be inhaled into the lungs. PM2.5 levels in many parts of Thailand each dry season typically far exceed guideline levels set by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Medical experts have long linked this particulate matter to heightened risk of developing lung cancer, heart disease and stroke, which can shorten lifespans by four or five years.
The choking haze spurred many members of the Ban Pong Community Forest group to get involved with restoring their local ecosystem and protecting it from fire.
“I got fed up with having smoke irritating my eyes each year. The smoke was visible in the air,” says Jirathip Malanuan, 31, the youngest member of the group.
For Jirathip, the chance to take positive action toward tackling the haze by keeping the community forest healthy was a major draw. Living close to a greener environment also keeps her close to nature, she adds, and the cleaner air filtered and cooled by the forest brings her real health benefits.
As Rachaprapa puts it: “When we protect the forest, the forest protects us.”
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Teak plantations, farmland and villages in Ngao, northern Thailand. Image by Carolyn Cowan/Mongabay.
Community forestry promotes bottom-up efforts
Ban Pong Community Forest is one of more than 11,000 such forests in Thailand, where a centralized, top-down forest management system had long excluded communities. That changed in 2019 when the government introduced the Community Forestry Act, granting local rights to manage more than 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of unprotected forest.
The policy achieved benefits for both people and nature. A 2022 study in northern Thailand found nationally protected forests were better preserved when they overlapped with community-managed land stewarded under customary laws and practices.
“Many community forests act as buffer zones for protected areas,” says Warangkana Rattanarat, country director of RECOFTC Thailand. Community forests give citizens legal and sustainable access to resources, she adds, which eases the pressure on forest reserves and ultimately supports ecosystem restoration at a landscape scale.
Reclaiming and restoring their forest has enriched local life in many ways. Beyond the sale of nontimber forest products, replenished groundwater supplies sustain nearby agriculture and aquaculture.
It took more than a decade for the water table to stabilize, Rachaprapa says. This enabled a group of residents to set up a fish farm in a lake on the edge of the village that once dried up outside of the monsoon season. Now with year-round water in the lake, more than 60 stakeholders in the business share the profits from their tilapia sales, helping reduce hunting pressure on local aquatic fauna.
The forest restoration has also done wonders for local wildlife. Members of the group listed various animals, such as lizards, kingfishers, wild boars, squirrels and deer as commonly seen in the community forest.
Check dams boost forest soils in moderation
As we walk deeper into the forest, the group comes across their most recently built check dam. The streambed it lies within is still mostly dry, but Rachaprapa says it will gradually retain more water, helping store humidity in the forest soil. Butterflies and dragonflies flit around several of the women as they inspect its structural integrity.
Check dams are not without controversy. Critics point out that they can be harmful to aquatic wildlife and forest biodiversity, especially when they obstruct the movement of fish between permanent water bodies, or transform fast-flowing systems into static and stagnant pools.
Balancing fire prevention and ecosystem health requires consultation with ecologists, says Narupot Piampanya, program officer of protected and conservation areas at the Thai office of the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority. “Empowering communities with ecological knowledge and tools to assess trade-offs can lead to more sustainable and locally adapted solutions.” Such collaborations with academics has enabled Ban Pong to refine their design and construction of dams in their community forest, Rachaprapa notes.
Much depends on where and how check dams are built, says Veerachai Tanipat, a senior scientist at the Wildland Fire Special Research Unit at Kasetsart University, Bangkok. Careful placement and moderate use is the key to minimizing ecological impacts, he says. “Building too many check dams will change the waterways in the forest [and] affect biodiversity,” he says. “Built wisely, however, they help to retain soil moisture.”
A women-led approach
Besides the pioneering use of check dams, Ban Pong’s women-led forest and fire management is relatively rare in Thailand. While Rachaprapa didn’t set out to attract women volunteers to the community forest group, many women stepped forward because air pollution threatened their families’ health and forest restoration was viewed as a potential solution. Before long, they made up the majority of the members.
Observers note the strength of their efforts as an example of how local women can help protect forests and restore landscapes in northern Thailand. “Ban Pong village demonstrates the positive impacts of women-led initiatives and provides a model for other communities,” says Katherine Poe, forest and grasslands program associate at the IUCN.
Women, especially in tropical regions like Thailand, face many barriers to accessing forests and land and are often marginalized in conservation and forest decision-making. “Women may face restricted access to land, natural resources, education, and capital, while gender norms can discourage or prevent women from participating in certain roles,” Poe says.
Yet women in forest-dependent communities also often rely on forest resources, such as nontimber forest products, more than men. “This means deforestation, biodiversity loss, and climate change tend to disproportionately harm women and girls,” Poe says. This underscores why women-led initiatives and women’s access to forest resources is so vital, she adds.
“Women can be powerful drivers of change, as they tend to hold valuable traditional knowledge and have high motivation to use forest resources sustainably,” Poe says, adding that including women in forest management “consistently leads to better results for people and the environment.”
Bamboo shoots are one of many marketable non-timber forest items that can support local livelihoods. Image by Carolyn Cowan/Mongabay.
Knowledge sharing for wider impact
Ban Pong’s efforts are gaining wider recognition from NGOs, state agencies and peers. The village is increasingly viewed as a hub for regional fire management, and many communities and specialists from elsewhere in Thailand and abroad visit to learn from them.
One of the communities they’ve shared with is the Ban Ton Tong Community Forest, also in Lampang province. Manid Aunekrue, head of Ban Ton Tong subdistrict, says the help from Ban Pong was instrumental in enabling villagers in Lampang to restore their local forests after they were degraded by logging and monoculture during the 1980s and 1990s. Agroforestry and nontimber forest products now generate important local revenues, he says.
“We can live with dignity because of our community forest,” Manid says. “Imagine if all the communities in Thailand had a forest like this. We could all have the resources we need.”
Author: Carolyn Cowan
This article was originally published on Mongabay under the Creative Commons BY NC ND licence. Read the original article.
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