Dr. Jain Charnnarong, Director of the Company, has realized the environmental problems regarding PM 2.5 and begun to study the solutions to reduce forest fires and villagers’ poverty which is called “Ban Kor Sandbox,” to reduce forest fires and villager’s poverty. On behalf of the president of Anandamahidol Foundation Scholarship Recipients’ Club, he asked for the cooperation from the civic sector to help villagers and government officials in solving forest fire problems and reducing the villagers’ poverty through water and soil resource managing, reforestation, livestock and fishery, travel, and wisdom creation.
Ban Kor (Kor village), Kor sub-district, Li district, Lamphun province is one of the villages which has suffered the most from forest fires in Thailand. Over the past 22 years, the area of Mae Ping National Park which surrounds Ban Kor has been exposed to forest fires up to 20 times which amounts to over 300,000 rai (480 square kilometers) every year.
Even the new plants have been recovered after a few months of forest fires, the microorganisms which cannot be seen with the naked eye were also destroyed, especially fungi. The tree roots of the Dipterocarpaceae Family in the Deciduous Dipterocarp forest are colonized by fungi. Such fungi provide water and nutrients for plants, and in exchange, the plants will photosynthesize and provide sucrose and glucose to the fungi. The symbiotic relationships bring about the abundant trees in the Deciduous Dipterocarp forest, even in dry areas lacking minerals in the soil. When the forest fires often occur, microorganisms and fungi are destroyed, which results in a dwarf forest. Moreover, the fires prevent the soil from holding water, which is why Ban Kor had such a long dry season such that other plants could not be grown, except field corn.
