Six new ASEAN Heritage Parks were declared this week. What happens to them next depends on money nobody has fully worked out how to raise.
There is a particular kind of conservation news that reads as an unambiguous win right up until you ask the second question. The first question, the one that made headlines out of this week’s ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on the Environment in Langkawi, is easy: how many new protected areas did Southeast Asia just gain? Six, as it happens, bringing the ASEAN Heritage Parks network to 69 sites across the region. Malaysia added the Tengku Hassanal Wildlife Reserve in Pahang, plus Bako National Park and Lambir Hills National Park in Sarawak. Vietnam added Pu Mat National Park, the Dong Nai Culture and Nature Reserve, and Xuan Thuy National Park. The second question is the one that actually matters, and it’s the one I keep coming back to every time one of these declarations lands: what, in practical terms, changes for the forest, the wetland, or the animal living in it, the day after the ceremony ends?
Whatever the answer turns out to be, these are not marginal places propped up by a marketing exercise. Bako is, by any honest measure, one of Borneo’s genuinely accessible wild places: a forty-kilometre trip from Kuching, a twenty-minute boat crossing from the jetty at Kampung Bako, and then a rainforest trail where proboscis monkeys are a realistic sighting rather than a hopeful one. Lambir Hills protects one of the most biodiverse patches of lowland forest left on the island, a short taxi ride from Miri rather than a multi-day expedition. Xuan Thuy has been quietly doing important work since 1989, when it became Southeast Asia’s first Ramsar-listed wetland, and it remains one of the region’s best wintering grounds for migratory waterbirds, the endangered black-faced spoonbill among them. They were worth protecting before this week, and they’re still worth protecting now.
Bako’s proboscis monkeys are among the reasons this newly recognised park draws visitors within an hour of Kuching.
The honest answer to that second question, though, is: less than the press release implies. ASEAN Heritage Park status is not a new layer of legal protection. Every site on that list of 69 was already a nationally protected area before it qualified. Bako has been a Sarawak national park since 1957, decades before ASEAN dreamed up the programme in 1984. What the designation actually confers is regional recognition, a shared badge indicating that a site’s biodiversity and ecosystem value clears a bar set by the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity, plus a modest amount of visibility and some access to small grants programmes. It does not come with a dedicated ASEAN conservation budget, and it does not override whatever pressures a national government has already decided to allow inside or around that park’s boundaries. If you were hoping the announcement itself meant six parks just got harder to log, mine, or dam, it didn’t.
This isn’t a criticism unique to this week’s six. It’s the central, unresolved tension running through the entire 41-year-old programme, and this week it was said out loud by someone with every incentive to say the opposite. At the same ASEAN Heritage Parks forum where this news broke, the Philippines’ Environment Secretary told the room plainly that declaring an area protected is only the beginning. He went on to warn that Southeast Asia has one of the world’s highest rates of deforestation relative to its size, and that the region could lose up to 40% of its biodiversity by the end of the century on current trends. That is not the framing of a man treating a heritage park declaration as mission accomplished, and it shouldn’t be treated that way by anyone reading about it either.
The funding gap he was talking about is not abstract. The ASEAN Heritage Parks Programme has always relied on a patchwork of national government budgets, which are, by the region’s own admission, limited and unpredictable, plus whatever international grants happen to be available in a given year. Some of that support is real: the ACB’s Small Grants Programme has funded biodiversity and capacity-building work in parks across Indonesia, Myanmar and Vietnam, and the Global Environment Facility has backed coastal Heritage Park management through its Marine and Coastal Conservation Programme. Dong Nai, one of this week’s new entries, has already drawn support from UNDP and WWF for community livelihoods work around the reserve. But a small grant here and a capacity-building programme there is not the same thing as sustained, predictable financing, and everyone inside the programme, including the people who run it, describes the gap between the two as significant and ongoing.
What actually works, where it works, tends to look less like a plaque and more like a business model. Dong Nai is the clearest example among this week’s six. The reserve already sits at the core of a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve, runs 18 ranger stations across its 100,000 hectares, and in June signed an agreement with Oxalis, the Vietnamese adventure tourism company behind some of the country’s best-known cave expeditions, to develop ranger-guided forest patrol experiences for visitors. That is conservation financing with a genuine mechanism attached to it: tourists pay to walk the same routes rangers already patrol, the reserve gets revenue and a reason to keep those routes maintained, and the rangers get a job that pays for itself rather than depending entirely on whatever the provincial budget allows that year. It is a small, specific answer to a large, vague problem, and it is a better one than most heritage park declarations manage to attach to themselves.
Tri An Lake forms part of the 100,000-hectare reserve now piloting a ranger-patrol ecotourism partnership with Oxalis.
What I’d push back on is the instinct, mine included, to read “declared an ASEAN Heritage Park” as an ending rather than a beginning. The badge buys visibility. It does not buy rangers, it does not buy anti-poaching patrols, and it does not buy the political will to say no to a road, a dam, or a logging concession when the moment actually arrives. That work is separate, harder, less photogenic, and it’s the work that determines whether Bako still has proboscis monkeys to watch in twenty years, or whether Xuan Thuy still has spoonbills wintering in its mangroves. If there’s a reason to care about this week’s news beyond the six new names on a list, it’s this: the parks that manage to pair their recognition with something like Dong Nai’s ranger-patrol arrangement tend to still be worth visiting a decade later. The ones that treat the declaration as the finish line tend not to be.
So visit Bako if you’re in Sarawak, and go to Xuan Thuy if migratory birds interest you even slightly. Buy the boat ticket, hire the guide, spend the money inside the park rather than just outside its gates. It won’t close the ASEAN Heritage Parks Programme’s funding gap on its own, but it’s a more honest form of support than reading a press release and assuming the job is done.
Further Reading
For another example of what a conservation status actually delivers once the ceremony ends, Con Dao National Park’s route onto the IUCN Green List is a useful comparison: a different certification, a different set of criteria, but the same underlying question about what happens after the badge is awarded.
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