Regenerating Rainforests

With your support, Alam Sehat Lestari (ASRI) continues to demonstrate how community-designed solutions can protect rainforests while improving the well-being of the people who depend on them. In 2025, this work received growing international attention, highlighting how locally led planetary health initiatives around Gunung Palung National Park are contributing to broader conversations about conservation, resilience, and community leadership across Borneo, Indonesia.

A recent reflection by Rhett Ayers Butler, founder of Mongabay, highlighted ASRI’s approach as an example of how conservation efforts can align human well-being with ecosystem protection. Butler describes how conservation narratives are evolving. The sector is moving away from communication centered only on crisis and toward stories that emphasize agency, solutions, and evidence-based optimism.

Within this broader context, Butler points to Health In Harmony and ASRI’s “health for forests” approach in Borneo as an example of how conservation can succeed when it begins with community priorities. Rather than asking communities to protect forests only because they matter globally, the approach starts by asking a simpler question: what do communities need? In many cases, the answer is access to affordable and reliable healthcare.

By responding to these needs, ASRI helps build a foundation for conservation actions that communities choose to lead themselves. Healthcare services, education programs, and sustainable livelihood opportunities are paired with initiatives such as forest monitoring and restoration. According to Butler, this alignment between human well-being and forest health helps explain why the model has proven durable and adaptable over time.

The article also situates this work within a broader shift in conservation thinking that increasingly recognizes Indigenous peoples and local communities as decision-makers and leaders. Programs that emerge from local leadership, Butler notes, are often the ones most capable of sustaining impact and spreading to new contexts because they are grounded in place and shaped by real community priorities.

For ASRI and its partners, this recognition reinforces a lesson that has guided the organization for nearly two decades. Solutions designed together with communities, through processes such as Radical Listening, are more resilient, more trusted, and more likely to generate lasting outcomes for both people and forests.

Thank you for making this work possible. Your support allows ASRI to continue partnering with rainforest communities as they design and implement solutions that protect forests, improve health, and strengthen resilience for generations to come.

Links:

• Less crisis, more agency - Article by Rhett Butler

With your support, ASRI is demonstrating how investments in community-designed solutions stop deforestation and improve community thriving. 

As ASRI approaches its 20th anniversary, communities around Gunung Palung National Park continue to lead vital planetary health initiatives, which improve their lives and protect the rainforest. 

The clinic established by ASRI in 2007 is evolving. Happily, medical needs have declined due to improved and sustained health outcomes and the emergence of stronger national health services in the last decade. At the same time, demand for conservation programs is expanding. And, the clinic is now a hub for training experts, students, and organizations on planetary health!

A strategic partnership with Indonesia’s Ministry of Health, as well as other key stakeholders like the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, the Gunung Palung National Park Office, and local education offices have strengthened ASRI’s impact, integrating expertise, funding, and innovation to improve health, drive reforestation, and create sustainable livelihoods. Together, these efforts buffer communities and ecosystems against shocks and stressors, including climate shocks, and boost resilience.

Thank you for your continued support of the community-led initiatives in Indonesia, which are made possible because of you. Your belief in our shared mission enables ASRI to equip rainforest communities to implement solutions designed directly by them, for them, as their needs evolve over time. For this, we remain grateful.