Support 13 villages to save the Bornean Rainforest

Did you know that 80% of the world's biodiversity and 30% of the world's carbon is found in lands, territories, and seas Indigenous People and local communities safeguard? When Indigenous peoples' and local community’s tenure is secured, forests stay standing, store more carbon, and wildlife is protected. Yet so many communities still do not have the basic right to their ancestral home. Indigenous communities are facing uphill battles to secure and protect their rights to land.

In the Heart of Borneo, lives the Dayak community. For generations, the men and women living in the ancient forests of Gunung Naning nurtured a strong cultural and spiritual connection to the land and the wildlife that lived there. Through traditional practices, they stewarded the land, until it was taken from them.

In the 1980s their land rights were stripped as major swathes of the forest were given protection status in line with the global push to create protected areas. This was done without any consideration of traditional land use and customary rights of the local Indigenous tribes. Breaking their connection to the forest and severing them from their subsistence resources and livelihoods. The rest of the forest was sold to natural resource extraction corporations and converted to logging and palm oil concessions.

Cut off from their land, excluded from their ancestral home, and conflict rising, the traditional management and stewardship broke down and poverty rose. Lacking access to their livelihoods, and the natural resources provided by the forest, communities struggled economically and were faced with higher health, education and basic living costs. Inequalities escalated. Together, these drivers create conditions for unrestrained logging, degrading forest habitats, and poaching causing endangered wildlife such as Sunda pangolins, hornbills, gibbons, and orangutans to face the illegal wildlife trade.

But now, these communities are taking back their land. 

In 2008, the Indonesian government began seeking to remedy such historical injustices, launching the landmark Social Forestry scheme. The scheme provides the opportunity for local communities to gain legal tenure rights to access their historic forest homelands and balances forest conservation with the economic and cultural needs of Indigenous communities. But the process of securing tenure rights is burdensome, it requires specific legal knowledge and skills. Even if rights are secured local Dayak communities are faced with challenges related to retaining their use rights by having to develop natural resource management plans and work plans, which almost always require external assistance.

Links:

• Visit Planet Indonesia

"For all the community - let’s grow together, fight together, and prosper together” – Sudirman, lead farmer from Bentiang Madomong Village.

The Gunung Nyiut Penrissen Forest Complex is among the last remaining forested landscape along the West Kalimantan – Sarawak, Malaysia border. The location of Gunung Nyiut makes it a prime target for illegal enterprises that harvest natural resources and, in the last two decades, the forest has been under threat from deforestation. This primary forest region is not only important habitat for biodiversity, maintaining water supplies and protecting human health, but it is also critically important in mitigating climate change.

When Planet Indonesia first began working in Gunung Nyiut in 2015, we recognized the conflicts and issues that both drove and resulted from deforested and degraded land. This is why we have been working with Indigenous Dayak communities to co-manage this reserve with government agencies to reduce deforestation. In that time we have seen a 77% reduction in forest loss, in part due to improvements in local livelihoods, health, education, and climate-smart agricultural farming practices. During that time we also partnered with villages to implement agroforestry programs and drive natural reforestation efforts.

Sudirman, from the Bentiang Madomong Village - a community of over 1,000 people, is one such partner. He is head of the lead farmer group that we support and works with the community to increase the practice of sustainable farming and agroforestry techniques to build systems that support forest regeneration. Village-led conservation efforts have seen the planting of 68,500 trees of 46 different species in degraded forest land, ensuring the forests that remain standing are healthier and denser.

But how does this community forest management effort mitigate against climate change globally? We have recently been working with the team at Health in Harmony through Rainforest Exchange and the Woodwell Climate Research Center to undertake a geospatial analysis to calculate the carbon sequestration of Gunung Nyiut over the last two decades and analyze the changes.

In 2003, the Gunung Nyiut Nature Reserve stored 13.9 million metric tons of aboveground carbon, with an average carbon density of 150.5 tons of carbon per hectare. In 2018, the carbon storage increased to 14.0 million metric tons with an average density of 152.5 tons of carbon per hectare. That’s more than 51 million tons of C02 equivalents! That's equal to 856 thousand cross-country US flights or taking more than 11 million cars off the road for a year — a quarter of all cars in America.

Woodwell Climate Research Center provided us with the values to determine the gain, net, and loss of aboveground carbon storage over time (fig 1). What is exciting for us to see is that Gunung Nyiut, our first landscape, where we now have over 12 village partners protecting forests and improving livelihoods for 7,500 people, became a carbon sink in 2015 just as we began working in the area.

As far as this is good news, it comes with the sobering fact that the world has lost more than 7% of its intact forests in the last decade and carbon emissions due to tropical deforestation are accelerating. We know that climate change impacts the most vulnerable in our society the hardest. Drastic weather events such as floods and cyclones, sea-level rise effects on coastal areas, and shifting weather patterns affecting farming productivity will continue to have cascading negative impacts on Indonesia’s rural communities. There is an urgent need to implement climate change adaptation strategies to reduce such impacts for climate-vulnerable communities.  This is why our holistic set of programs are underpinned by an ecosystem-based adaptation strategy, a cost-effective low-risk approach to build climate resilience for local communities and their surrounding ecosystems. This involves our capacity development programs supporting partner communities to develop resilient food systems through expediting sustainable agriculture and fishery practices that directly support short-term climate adaptation strategies. We combine this with our approach that provides both financial and non-financial incentives, enabling communities to adapt to the long-term impacts of climate change.

For the world to reach its ambitious climate goals, it has to recognize that there are no better stewards of the land and high-quality high-carbon ecosystems than the Indigenous peoples and local communities who have lived there for centuries. By working with local communities and shifting the balance of power back to local caretakers, we can turn the tides on global forest loss to help the world combat climate change.

This work is done in parntership with BKSDA Kalimantan Barat.

Links:

• Indigenous forest management combating climate change: Gunung Ny