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| A worker carrying saplings at Sebangau National Park. Less than 1 percent of the park’s total area has been reforested. (Antara Photo) |
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Palangkaraya,
Central Kalimantan. Rosdy Abaza is under no illusions about the task before him
as the person in charge of restoring the sprawling Sebangau National Park in
Central Kalimantan to pristine condition.
“We’re
attempting to restore a forest that has been comprehensively destroyed, so you
could say this is a mission impossible,” he tells the Jakarta Globe at one of
the observation posts scattered across the 568,700-hectare park.
The park,
between the Katingan and Kahayan rivers, was only formally established in 2004.
Between 1980 and 1995, it was the site of 13 massive logging concessions that
left the formerly dense and pristine peat forest stripped bare and dried out.
In the
unregulated years between being a logging forest and a national park, the
Sebangau area was the target of massive illegal logging that was estimated to
have cleared some 66,000 hectares of forest.
Rosdy says
the park area previously covered by peat swamp — a meters-deep layer of
hundreds of years’ worth of decaying vegetation — makes up 85 percent of the
total area, and to restore it back to its pre-logged state would take another
several centuries.
One of the
first things the loggers did when they came in was to carve out a network of
more than 1,000 canals, two to four meters wide, to drain the peat swamp to
make it easy to transport the logs downstream. That left the exposed peat
layer, in some places up to 12 meters deep, highly vulnerable to forest fires.
Also to
blame was the government’s misguided Mega Rice Project of 1996, a scheme to
clear-cut the centuries-old peat forests in Kalimantan, drain the soil and set
up a million hectares of rice paddies.
Part of the
land for the MRP was a wide swath between the Sebangau and Kahayan rivers. When
the MRP was abandoned, there was no attempt to restore the peat forest and the
affected area on the eastern third of the Sebangau National Park remains
severely degraded.
The key to
restoring the condition of the peat forest is to get the water back into the
ground, which Rosdy acknowledges is a daunting task.
The park
management’s two main conservation programs deal with blocking the former
logging canals and reforesting the denuded land. The success of the latter is
contingent on that of the former, but the canal-blocking program has stumbled
on funding issues.
Of the 428
dams built since the start of 2011 to block up the canals, only one was funded
by the park. The rest were funded by the World Wide Fund for Nature.
“Ideally we
should be building 100 dams a year,” Rosdy says, adding that the cost for each
dam is about Rp 80 million ($8,500).
Like the
canal-blocking program, the reforestation program has also been slow to take
off.
Just 4,868
hectares — less than 1 percent of Sebangau’s total area — have been reforested.
Of that figure, less than half was funded by the state, with the rest coming
from conservation groups and corporate social responsibility programs.
But against
the overwhelming odds, Rosdy says there is reason to be hopeful about the
future of the park.
Thanks to
the damming program, the water level in the peat layer in some areas has begun
rising since 2005, leading to the return of native tree species, including the
critically endangered red balau, the hardwood jelutong and the softwood pulai.
The
recovering water levels have also meant less frequent forest fires. “We haven’t
had any major forest fires in this area since 2009,” Rosdy says.
As the
forest slowly recovers, there is also hope for the survival of the various
wildlife species native to the area. These include Bornean orangutans,
proboscis monkeys and Bornean gibbons, all of which are endangered species.
Sebangau is
home to an estimated 6,000 orangutans, the largest wild population of the ape
anywhere in the world.
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