Endow This

So we finished work on the carbon project valuation, except for the countless little bugs with the model that kept coming up last week. The lesson I took away with it is that you can't test your model too much.

I began working this week on a business plan for a conservation trust fund in the Cardamom Mountains in Cambodia and am feeling woefully ill-equipped as I leaf through reports on the work done in the area since it became safe to live and work in. I'm not going to go into all the back history, but long story short, the mountains were the last hold out of the Khmer Rouge (if you don't know anything about the Khmer Rouge, I suggest watching the movie the Killing Fields), and the unsafe conditions and the lack of access to roads for decades kept people from venturing in and settling down with their families. The area is rich with plant and animal life endemic to the mountain range and probably worth trying to protect, especially now that it is under greater threat from illegal poaching, harvesting and logging activities and human settlement and crop cultivation.

It's all well and good to write a business plan, but I am afraid no amount of writing can make local enforcement effective, get government agencies and NGOs with competing agendas to cooperate, or convince communities to roust the illegal poachers and be more thoughtful when clearing of land for agriculture. All the reports I've read indicate that the development projects in the area try to do everything in very short periods of time - enforcement, government capacity building, sustainable livelihood development, research, monitoring, and the list goes on. As an aid organization, there is little incentive to undersell what you can deliver, so they under deliver.

So I'm trying to bring focus to the business plan, but just funding enforcement is so unsexy.

My other issue (I'm starting to create a list of them) is that a business plan, as far as my understanding goes, is supposed to provide guidance to an organization on how to increase their profits by either cutting costs, finding new source of income or increasing revenues. The problem with the endowment model is that, if operational costs are covered with the interest from the fund's investments, to disburse a reasonable amount every year to cover those costs, the fund needs to be very well endowed (in this case, endowment is not genetic). I am skeptical that anyone will pony up the resources (human and capital) that the protected area needs to raise the funds required to capitalize the endowment, or that, in less than one month, we will be able to satisfy what was promised in terms of researching potential sources of income. We will try.

So I've got a lot of work ahead of me, and not a lot of time to do it, AND Bali as a major source of distraction. I just hope this doesn't mean an end to surfing and fun.