Koh Kapik: Where Mangroves, Women and Community Are Growing Together

Cafés are such wonderful places to have conversations and discover new things about local places. During my recent trip to Cambodia, the coffee connoisseur in me made really good friends with a local café owner. Somewhere between conversations about his life, what motivated him to open a café, and what my own work looks like, we ended up talking about this beautiful island called Koh Kapik.

Initially, his recommendation was for tourism, but while doing my own research about the island, I came across its mangroves, the people restoring them and the women leading the work. I was intrigued to ask him if he knew about this work, and he did. And I remember thinking: how many conservation stories begin this way? Not in a conference room, not with some fancy policy announcement, but through ordinary people talking about a place or systems that they care about.

Koh Kapik, located along Cambodia’s Gulf of Thailand, is home to around 12,000 hectares of mangrove forest and is recognised internationally as an Ramsar site, an important wetland (IUCN, 2025). These mangroves protect coastlines, support fisheries, provide habitat for wildlife and act as a natural defence against storms and erosion. But what makes Koh Kapik particularly special to me is that its restoration story is not just about trees. It is about women. A team of women, led by Seab Sophea, manages a local tree nursery where they grow more than 14 species of mangroves. These seedlings are eventually planted back into degraded areas, while some also support ecotourism activities. Since 2023, more than 15,000 mangrove trees have been planted, with thousands more planned (IUCN, 2025). This is where I believe the story becomes much bigger than mangrove restoration. Because conservation is often spoken about as though communities are simply people who need to be protected or educated. Image Credits: IUCN

Koh Kapik offers a different way of looking at it. What happens when communities are not treated as beneficiaries of conservation, but as its leaders? The women working in the nursery are gaining income, skills and new opportunities through ecotourism. Restoration is creating livelihoods alongside restoring ecosystems.

I think this is what makes Koh Kapik so beautiful. The mangroves are not being restored for the community. They are being restored bythe community. That is the kind of conservation we need more of. Conservation where restoring an ecosystem also means restoring livelihoods, strengthening local leadership, creating dignity and making people feel that the future of a place belongs to them too. When it just doesn’t become a matter of growing trees but it builds an entirely different relationship between people and the places they call home.