Power plants could spell finis for Cat Tien rhinos

Cat Tien National Park faces the risk of losing its last few rhinoceroses, with a proposed hydropower plant set to further shrink their habitat, most of which has already been lost to human encroachment.

The Javan rhino, a small one-horned species, was first discovered in the park 10 years ago. All five species of rhinos in the world are facing extinction but the Javan rhino is critically endangered.

The 5,000-hectare Cat Loc Rhinoceros Reserve was established in 1992 and merged with the national park in 1998 to protect the last remaining Javan rhinos in the country.

The park stretches over 71,350 hectares and straddles Lam Dong Province in the Central Highlands and Dong Nai and Binh Phuoc provinces to the east of Ho Chi Minh City.

The Lam Dong administration last December approved construction of the Dong Nai No. 6 hydropower plant, whose dam will come up less then three kilometers from the rhino reserve.

A Cat Tien National Park official, who wished to remain unnamed, said work on the plant would continue to “chop up the park and throw it under water.”

“The price for power is too expensive.

“And we won’t be able to estimate the price when one of our last single-horned rhino populations is pushed to extinction.”

A reservoir belonging to another ongoing hydropower project, Dong Nai No. 5, is set to submerge some 200 hectares of the national park.

The project was approved in 2007 on the park’s buffer zone and around 1,000 tons of explosives will be used for the construction.

Cat Tien managers said the hydropower plants would hasten the extinction of the shy and sensitive park rhinos.

At a conference in Dong Nai last year, wildlife experts and government officials had expressed concern that rhinos in Vietnam are “stressed out” by human activity.

The animals are so busy trying to avoid humans that they do not reproduce, something at which they are not good at to begin with, the experts had said.

A female rhino, which has a life span of 30-45 years in the wild, gives birth to just five young at most.

In March 2003, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development approved a plan to move many ethnic families out of the rhino reserve but it was never carried out.

Cat Tien National Park is home to 40 animal species on the international red list of endangered animals. It is located too close to human habitation and is under constant threat from poachers and illegal loggers and encroachment by residents.

Reported by Lam Vien