Earlier this week, Prime Minister Hun Sen called for urgent fortification of Cambodia’s resistance to climate change, singling out recent flooding as evidence of the severe consequences the country faces.

But at a press conference yesterday, opposition lawmaker Mu Sochua accused the prime minister of weakening Cambodia’s capacity to respond to environmental change.

“All these effects of climate change are because of logging that Prime Minister Hun Sen has allowed,” she said.

In May, Hun Sen boasted that Cambodia could soon have a rubber industry bigger than Vietnam’s in the same week that a report found rubber firms responsible for deforesting large swathes of the country.

The report, from UK watchdog Global Witness, accuses Vietnamese rubber firms awarded huge economic land concessions by the government of perpetuating a “land grabbing crisis” and engaging in large-scale illegal logging.