For years, Ngoc Anh chopped down trees illegally, often working with others to carry 100-kg logs out of a rapidly thinning forest. But as extreme rainfall and floods devastated his community, he turned to conservation andtourism. Now he is one of 250 former loggers trained by an adventure tourism company to lead tourists into some of the world's largest cave systems in the Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park. They patrol trails to keep poachers away, remove animal traps, and clean up trash in the UNESCO world heritage site. While Vietnam lost about 3 million hectares of tree cover between 2001 and 2020, a government crackdown on illegal logging since 2007 has helped slow deforestation. Vietnam has pledged to end deforestation by 2030.

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