DEVELOPING INDONESIA'S LANDSCAPE RESTORATION COMMITMENT
Most of us are familiar with the feeling of being a child inadvertently privy to an adult conversation, which describes how I felt after a last-minute invitation to a closed door meeting at Le Meridian Hotel in Jakarta, November 12, entitled: Membangun Komitmen Restorasi Bentang Alam Ekosistem Indonesia (Developing Indonesia’s Landscape Restoration Commitment).
It was a half day meeting, populated by several Director Generals from the Forestry Department, a scattering of former Ministers, long-term conservationists and a few business moguls, brought together to formulate Indonesia’s commitment to forest restoration as part of the IUCN Bonn Challenge Pledge[1] to be presented at the Indonesian Pavilion during the Global Landscape Forum associated with this month’s COP 21 in Paris.
The meeting was coordinated by a host of BINGO’s (Big International NGO’s) including; Bird Life, Conservation International, Kehati Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, Wetlands International, Wildlife Conservation Society, WWF, and World Resources Institute.
Over 63 percent (82.9 million hectares) of Indonesia’s Forest Estate is currently deforested or degraded (Budhiartha et al., 2014) and the challenge to restore a significant portion of these degraded lands while balancing the need to achieve development goals for oil palm, timber plantations and energy production is on the global stage at COP 21.
In response to this challenge, IUCN and World Resources Institute have developed a useful tool called ROAM (Restoration Assessment Methodology), intended to help nations quantify and prioritize sites for landscape scale restoration. Unfortunately, even with the advantage of cutting edge spatial analysis, this specific meeting failed to capture the need to think at an appropriate scale, the scale of the nation for which we were tasked to develop a quantifiable restoration commitment. An inordinate amount of time was spent promoting a very small subset of isolated projects such as Samboja Lestari, which features the industrialization of palm sugar from Arenga pinnata in a landscape restoration setting. Although these individual projects certainly have merits, as a group we were clearly unable to pull back to see the forest through the trees.
The sad truth about much of Indonesia’s current reforestation efforts is that although restoration is embedded in all relevant national and sub-national agencies, made operational by annual and 5-year strategic plans and matching budgets, the results are largely disappointing.
An example from the mangrove world looks at annual government funded mangrove planting projects which took place over a 4-year period (2010-2014) in 16 villages spread across 4 districts in the Province of South Sulawesi. Each of these 64 planting projects was supposed to restore 10 hectares of mangroves, or 6400 hectares in 4 years. In reality, only 0.5 ha of plantings survived past an initial year. The head of the forestry department in one of the surveyed districts (Barru) stated that his office had planted mangroves annually for 10 years, experiencing total mortality each time, and that he couldn’t explain the reason for failure (Brown et al., 2014).
The task of synthesizing the meeting was left to Ir. Sarwono Kusumaatmadja, former Indonesian Minister of Marine Affairs and Fisheries (1999-2001) and a strong supporter of community based natural resource management and friend to NGO’s world-wide. Unfortunately, the lack of cohesiveness of the meeting was represented in Pak Sarwono’s synthesis in which he stated, “We can go to COP 21 with a number [restoration target] and be criticized for it, or without a number and be criticized for it. I choose the latter, and that is the message I will deliver to the President [Joko Widodo] in our meeting this evening.” At this, the announcement came that the meeting was over and lunch would be served. The sense of accidentally over-hearing an adult conversation had entirely left me by this point, replaced by the feeling of a child amongst his playmates getting ready for recess after a morning of make-believe.
[1] The IUCN Bonn Challenge calls for the restoration of 150 million hectares of deforested and degraded lands by 2020.
Ben Brown is a PhD candidate with the Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods (RIEL) and is the co-founder of Blue Forests, an Indonesian NGO.
