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