How vietnam’s cave conservation efforts are bringing wildlife back from the brink

Three and a half decades ago, Vietnamese hunter Hồ Khanh made an extraordinary discovery while seeking shelter from a sudden storm—he had stumbled into what would later be confirmed as the world’s largest cave. But in that moment, his attention was elsewhere. Like many locals in the ancient karst limestone region between Vietnam and Laos, Hồ made his living by extracting whatever the jungle could offer: slow lorises sold as exotic pets, pangolin scales for traditional medicine, and the prized agarwood—a fragrant heartwood worth its weight in gold for incense and ornaments.

After the storm passed, Hồ returned to his hunting, and the memory of that echoing cave entrance gradually faded. At the time, wildlife was already becoming scarce due to intensive hunting and harvesting pressure. “Back then, we barely saw any wildlife,” recalls Howard Limbert, a British cave explorer who began mapping the region’s underground systems with his wife Deb in the 1990s.

The turning point came in 2007, when the Limberts heard Hồ’s story about a mysterious cave opening that produced haunting sounds from its depths. Their collaboration would eventually lead to the rediscovery and protection of what is now known as Sơn Trạ Cave, located within Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng National Park. The conservation efforts that followed—protecting these vast underground ecosystems and the forests above them—appear to have created an unexpected benefit: a remarkable recovery of local wildlife populations that were once on the verge of disappearing entirely.