Indonesian Ecological Restoration & Education

Bill Brower is a Field Program Officer with GlobalGiving who is visiting our partners’ projects throughout South and Southeast Asia. On April 1st he visited the Jepara Forest Conservancy (IFCAE implementing partner) reforestation site near Kunir village (no joke). His “Postcard” from the visit:

I visited this IFCAE-supported project on my last day in Southeast Asia and it was a pleasure to end on such a high note. Deforestation has and is taking a tragic toll on the environment and peoples of Indonesia; it is heartening to know there are organizations like the Jepara Forest Conservancy (JFC) who are taking strides to limit future deforestation and reverse the loss of forest cover.

While the UN bickers over the best way to implement deforestation projects, JFC is implementing what I would call an environmentally and socially sustainable pilot project. (I have some knowledge in the area—my Master’s dissertation dealt partly with forestry in central Africa.) JFC is planting a wide range of native, valuable trees irregularly-spaced on a deforested hillside—a sharp contrast to many of the geometric, monoculture plantations often touted as reforestation. (Just trees do not a forest make.) Following a 75% die-off in their first attempt on their own on a smaller plot, they consulted many experts, including Eric and Greg at IFCAE, and have a 97% survival rate in this area after the first (crucial) year.

But having an environmentally-sound approach will be useless if the conditions that allowed the area to be deforested in the first place are not addressed. Tim O’Brien of JFC says when he came to this area just a few years ago, it was a dense jungle. It was stripped bare by loggers. When JFC started working in Kunir, the community told them any serious conservation effort would need the public forestry agency on board. According to Tim it has been a long process (three years), but the agency has now agreed to help maintain and protect the forest for 30 years—the kind of long range commitment needed for reforestation.

Even if an area is protected on paper, it is still threatened by people illegally logging, so JFC is trying to make the forest more valuable to the community standing than cut down. Many of the trees being planted are fruit bearing, and they are looking into planting coffee. They’re also hoping to create as many “market-based” jobs as possible in the community so people have sufficient alternative sources of income and don’t feel the need to cut down the trees. They’ve provided the some people in the community with a type of goat that produces particularly valuable milk; they’re looking into briquette production from coconut husks and organic spice production.

JFC’s plans are broad and in the preliminary stages but they’ve shown the ability to learn and adapt over time so it seems they will be able to come up with a formula with the community to successfully reforest the surrounding area while improving people’s economic standing. They’re off to a good start.

(p.s. Tim’s company, Tropical Salvage, supports JFC financially and is also playing a role in reducing the drivers of deforestation. They create beautiful furniture out of hardwoods sourced not from standing trees but salvaged from old buildings and out of rivers and swamps and from trees that fall down naturally. Through their outlets in the U.S. they seek to educate consumers about the problems with deforestation in Indonesia, because ultimately without people buying products made from deforested wood the drive to destroy these habitats is greatly diminished. A link to their website is below.)

Links:

• Video: Tim describes the JFC project
• Tropical Salvage website