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By CJ Hudlow
In rain boots and a red hard hat, Bambang Wahyudi hoofs his way through the Bornean forest. It’s not raining, but he’s spent enough time in these forests to know that it always pays to be prepared.
Over the course of his 20-year career in the logging industry—Bambang Wahyudi learned everything there is to know about conventional logging. He also saw the negative impacts of over-harvesting the forest—from the destruction of vital wildlife habitat to the impoverishment of local communities.
Bambang knew there had to be a better way.
Which led him to join The Nature Conservancy as the Reduced-Impact Logging (RIL) Manager to help his countrymen find a better way to live off their forests without losing them forever.
Today Bambang is helping refine and promote a promising solution: reduced-impact logging. Surprisingly simple changes to how a company logs a forest can yield more intact forests, cleaner water, healthier and happier local villagers, and, on a global scale, more trees sequestering carbon and fighting climate change.
Cleaning Up a Dirty Job
Working for a logging company in Indonesia is not an easy job: long, hard hours in hot and humid conditions, months away from your family in remote areas, and exposure to dangerous diseases like malaria and dengue fever. But for many here, being a logger is considered a great job and a regular source of income for your family.
But logging—along with mining and the rapidly growing oil palm industry—is carving away huge swaths of the regions forests at a rate faster than anywhere else on Earth. More than 64 million acres of Indonesia’s forests have been cleared since 1990—an area larger than the state of Oregon.
Given that deforestation around the world accounts for 17 percent of carbon and other heat-trapping pollutants each year, forest loss in Indonesia is a global issue. In fact, Indonesia is the third largest emitter of carbon behind United States and China—and 80 percent of Indonesia’s emissions are due to deforestation.
Healthy Forests for Healthy People
Like the Conservancy is doing in places like California and Bolivia, Bambang is now teaching loggers in the 5.4 million acre Berau district on the island of Borneo to reduce their impact on forests.
Companies participating in reduced-impact logging target only commercially valuable trees, taking care not to damage young trees and other nearby species when felling and extracting timber, which helps the forest—and carbon stores—regenerate more quickly.
“This approach benefits the livelihoods of the local communities—it keeps river water clean,” explains Bambang. “This means fresh fish remain for villagers, and animals and plants remain in the forest where they belong.”
“We get all of our medicine from the forest. The roofs of our buildings, our huts on the field, they all came form the forest. So our lives depend on the forest,” says Lung Bu, village leader of Long Oking—a village inside the Berau district.
While Bambang’s on-the-ground work with reduced-impact logging is earning exciting local results, it is also part of the Conservancy’s global-scale efforts to stem deforestation and fight climate change.
Local Trees, Global Significance
The Conservancy is working throughout the Berau district and regionally in East Kalimantan to develop a road map for creating direct economic incentives to maintain the forests.
This effort—one of the most ambitious of its kind globally—is also a key component of the Conservancy’s strategy to ground-truth concepts and policies under discussion as the world’s countries look for a global climate change solution.
The approach—called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD)—is about providing alternatives to over-harvesting forests. Instead of locking up forests, the idea is to protect them in a way that brings direct benefits to the communities, logging companies and governments.
REDD programs are in an early phase of development, but the approach has been welcomed by the Indonesian government, and success could lead to better protection for large forest areas—and important orangutan habitat—in the future.
Slated to start work on the ground in 2010, the Conservancy-supported REDD project in Berau—which includes RIL and multiple other carbon emission reduction strategies—will likely be the biggest effort to protect a forest for its carbon in the world. And success in Indonesia could spur other nations to introduce carbon conservation programs that reward them for keeping their forests intact while strengthening local economies.
“Indonesia is showing important leadership through its support of this program. By confronting these challenges in a comprehensive way, the Berau program is finding solutions for reducing deforestation emissions that will provide clear examples to the rest of the world,” states Andrew Deutz, the Conservancy's Director of International Government Relations.
“My hope is that the local communities will be a player to manage their own forests with their local wisdom for the purpose of continuing their livelihoods,” says Bambang.
At the global climate change negotiations coming up in Copenhagen this December, many groups—including the Conservancy—will join with several governments to send a clear message: the protection of forests is a vital part of combating climate change.
If forest destruction worldwide accounts for 17 percent of the problem, protecting woodlands could represent nearly 17 percent of the solution.
CJ Hudlow is a Marketing Manager for the Conservancy’s Asia Program
(October 2009)
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Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Bridget Besaw (Villager from Long Laai in the Berau District); Photo © Bridget Besaw (Bambang Wahyudi).
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