Green Peace Borneo

Borneo, the third largest island in the world, was once covered with dense rain forests. With swampy coastal areas fringed with mangrove forests and a mountainous interior, much of the terrain was virtually impassable and unexplored. Headhunters ruled the remote parts of the island until a century ago.


In the 1980s and 1990s Borneo underwent a remarkable transition. Its forests were leveled at a rate unparalleled in human history. Borneo's rain forests went to industrialized countries like Japan and the United States in the form of garden furniture, paper pulp and chopsticks. Initially most of the timber was taken from the Malaysian part of the island in the northern states of Sabah and Sarawak. Later forests in the southern part of Borneo, an area belonging to Indonesia and known as Kalimantan, became the primary source for tropical timber. Today the forests of Borneo are but a shadow of those of legend and those that remain are highly threatened by the emerging bio fuels market, specifically, oil palm.



Oil palm is the most productive oil seed in the world. A single hectare of oil palm may yield 5,000 kilograms of crude oil,or nearly 6,000 liters of crude, making the crop remarkably profitable when grown in large plantations — one study that looked at 10,000 hectare-plantations suggests an internal rate of return of 26 percent annually. As such, vast swathes of land are being converted for oil palm plantations. Oil palm cultivation has expanded in Indonesia from 600,000 hectares in 1985 to more than 6 million hectares by early 2007, and is expected to reach 10 million hectares by 2010.


Despite this outlook, there has recently been some positive conservation news out of Borneo. In February 2007, the governments of Brunei, Malaysia, and Indonesia agreed to protect roughly 220,000 square kilometers (85,000 square miles) of tropical forest in the so-called "Heart of Borneo". Environmental group WWF was particularly active in the establishment of the protected area.


STAY GREEN BORNEO

On paper, 9 percent of Kalimantan, 8 percent of Sarawak, and 14 percent of Sabah are under some form of protection according to WWF, with the caveat that some areas designated as protected aren't really safe from deforestation. For example, in Kalimantan only 82 percent of "protected forest" is actually forested. Further, between 1985 and 2001, Kalimantan's protected lowland forests declined by about 56 percent, according to Lisa Curran.


WWF reports cite Kutai National Park as a case in point. Kutai was established in 1936 as a 306,000 hectare preserve but as timber concessions and oil exploration rights have been granted over the years, the park has since been reduced to an official area of 198,629 hectares. In the 1980s and 1990s illegal logging left much of the forest in a degraded state. The fires of 1997-1998 burned 92 percent of the park area.


Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan is another example. From 1998-2002 70 percent of the lowland buffer zone was deforested and today less than 9 percent of the buffer zone is lowland forest. Within the park, 38 percent of the lowland forest has been cleared by loggers.


Sabah

Of Sabah's 7.37 million hectares of land, 60 percent are forested (2005) according to the State Environmental Conservation Department. 3.6 million hectares of this forested area (known as the Permanent Forest Estate) can be broken down as follows:

Area (ha) Classification What it means

342,000 Class I: Protection Watershed and other "functional" forests. Cannot be logged

2,685,000 Class II: Commercial Forests that can be exploited

7,000 Class III Domestic Forests that can be logged for local consumption

21,000 Class IV: Amenity Recreational forests, often degraded

316,000 Class V: Mangrove Can be harvested

90,000 Class VI: Virgin Jungle Conserved for scientific purposes

133,000 Class VII: Wildlife Conserved as wildlife habitat



These figures suggest that 586,000 hectares — or 16 percent of Sabah's total forest area — are under some form of protection. In 1997 Sabah introduced a "Sustainable Forest Management License Agreement" system that requires the use of reduced impact logging techniques, though whether this is used in practice is open to debate. Forests on the remaining 2.4 million hectares can be harvested with a timber cutting license.


Sarawak

According to the state government, about two-thirds of Sarawak's 8.22 million hectares are covered with natural forest. The government says it seeks to protect about 8 percent of the state's natural forests with the rest of the land, in equal parts, devoted to commercial forest and agriculture.




Kalimantan

Almost all forests in Kalimantan are owned by the state. In recent years centralization means that forests once controlled by the national government are now controlled at the district level. On paper, forests have been mapped and allocated for various uses, but reality bears little resemblance to the actual situation, according to WWF, which notes "the actual size and state of Indonesia's remaining forests are difficult to establish from official statistics."


Officially, Kalimantan is broken down into the following divisions (WWF):