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Biofuel Boom Endangers Orangutan Habitat
October 19, 2008
Source: Los Aangeles Times – October 19, 2008
By Paul Watson, Tanjung Puting National Park, Indonesia
In the rush to feed the world’s growing appetite for climate-friendly fuel and cooking oil that doesn’t clog arteries, the Bornean orangutan could get plowed over.
Several plantation owners are eyeing Tanjung Puting park, a sanctuary for 6,000 of the endangered animals. It is the world’s second-largest population of a primate that experts warn could be extinct in less than two decades if a massive assault on its forest habitat is not stopped.
The orangutans’ biggest enemy, the United Nations says, is no longer poachers or loggers. It’s the palm oil industry.
On the receding borders of this 1,600-square-mile lush reserve, a road paved with good intentions runs smack into a swamp of alleged corruption and government bungling. It’s one of the mounting costs few bargained for in the global craze to “go green.”
The park clings to the southern tip of the island of Borneo, which is shared by Indonesia and Malaysia, the top producers of palm oil. Exporters market it as an alternative to both petroleum and cooking oils containing trans fats.
“That’s only a slogan, you know,” said Ichlas Al Zaqie, the local project manager for Los Angeles-based Orangutan Foundation International. “They change the forest, and say it’s for energy sustainability, but they’re killing other creatures.”
Indonesia is losing lowland forest faster than any other major forested country. At the rate its trees are being felled to plant oil palms, poach high-grade timber and clear land for farming, 98% of Indonesia’s forest may be lost by 2022, the United Nations Environment Program says. “If the immediate crisis in securing the future survival of the orangutan and the protection of national parks is not resolved, very few wild orangutans will be left within two decades,” UNEP concluded in a report last year. “The rate and extent of illegal logging in national parks may, if unchallenged, endanger the entire concept of protected areas worldwide.”
In July, loggers finished buzz-sawing and bulldozing a 40,000-acre swath in a northeastern corner of the park, where at least 561 orangutan lived, to clear ground for oil palm plants, Zaqie said.
The government isn’t much help, say environmental activists, who accuse corrupt officials, military and police officers of siding with timber poachers, illegal miners and others threatening the forests. Activists bemoan a territorial dispute between local officials and the provincial and national governments.
“The problem now is even the central government can’t really say where the exact border of the national park is,” said Yeppie Kustiwae, who handles the issue of forest conversion for the World Wide Fund for Nature in Indonesia.
Zaqie says palm oil companies are determined to take as much as 5 million acres of orangutan forest habitat in Tanjung Puting and the larger Sebangau National Park, where Borneo’s largest population of orangutans lives.
Tanjung Puting, a tropical Eden still revealing its secrets, shelters nine primate species, including rare proboscis monkeys, whose pendulous schnozzes can be 7 inches long.
Zaqie says he first saw bulldozers knocking down trees for the northeastern palm oil plantation five years ago. He was certain the loggers were on land included in the park in a 1996 government decree. He tried without success to stop the bulldozer operators. So Zaqie went to a manager, who confirmed that the forest was being converted into a plantation by an Indonesian company called Wanasawit Subur Lestari. A spokesman for its parent company, BEST Plantation Group, denied encroaching on the park.
“We are working based on a permit issued by the government,” said Wahyu Bimadhrata, BEST’s legal manager. “We don’t work inside the national park.”
Mounting pressures on the forest are easiest to see in the money made by palm oil plantations. In 1990, Indonesia earned $204 million from palm oil exports; the value exploded to more than $7.8 billion in 2007. Palm oil exports started growing sharply five years ago after the European Union declared a mandatory quota to replace gasoline and diesel from crude with biofuels. Last year, it raised the biofuel target to 10% of transportation fuels by 2020, driving the price of palm oil higher and ratcheting up the threat to rain forests.
The EU has maintained the policy even though a report in April by European Environment Agency scientists called it an “overambitious” experiment “whose unintended effects are difficult to predict and difficult to control.” Instead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, producing palm oil on what was once peat swamp forests may be boosting the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Leveling the jungle not only destroys trees that absorb carbon dioxide, it also releases millions of tons of carbon dioxide stored in Borneo’s peat for thousands of years. Fires set to clear trees and stumps add to the problem.
As companies lobby to clear more rain forest, other Indonesians are laboring to restore habitat for orangutans and rehabilitate those who lost their jungle homes or were rescued from poachers.
A decade ago, raging fires burned millions of acres of Borneo’s forest. The Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation bought 4,500 acres that farmers had abandoned to grassland at Samboja Lestari, on the island’s eastern side.
“People thought that in one or two years, we would give up,” said Ishak Yassir, the foundation’s regional program manager. “We proved them wrong.” His Indonesian staff cares for 224 orangutans; each day, teachers take their wide-eyed pupils to forest school. They teach them the basics, such as tree climbing; the proper way to eat dirt to get at insects, seeds and other nutrients; and avoiding snakes. Once they graduate, they join the list of orangutans ready to leave rehab.
Yassir’s staff has cleared more than 50 young adults for release over the last six years. But the orangutans’ rescuers can’t find enough safe forest for the apes to go home to. .
Orangutan Saviour Supplies Clean Drinking Water
October 16, 2008
Source: Radio Netherland – October 16, 2008
By Maarten Bakker
Close to the city of Balikpapan on the Indonesian island of Kalimantan, it took conservationist Willie Smits just a few years to plant an entire new forest to create a sanctuary for threatened orangutans. The young forest now apparently generates so much rainwater that Smits is going to provide Balikpapan with clean drinking water. He hopes that if the city’s inhabitants realise their water supply depends on the forest, they will also leave it untouched and stop destroying the apes’ habitat.
Willie Smits climbs an observation tower with three German visitors. He points proudly at the forest canopy covering the Samboja Lestari wildlife sanctuary. “Six years ago this was just grassland,” he says. The Germans have come to see the orangutans that Smits and his organisation, Borneo Orangutan Survival (BOS), take care of in Samboja Lestari. Smits has become world famous for championing these apes, which are being driven out of Indonesia’s tropical forests as their habitat is eaten away by logging and palm oil plantations.
Climate change
Planting a considerable stretch of new forest inevitably has an effect on the local microclimate, and in this case it’s a favourable one.
“Yes, it sounds incredible, but we’ve really changed the climate here,” Smits explains. “We’ve planted 2000 hectares of mixed forest with 1040 different tree species, and our measurements show that after six years the cloud cover over Samboja Lestari has increased by 12 percent. The amount of rainfall last year actually came out at 25 percent more! The new forest cools the atmosphere, and that attracts rain clouds.”
Drinking water
The most important effect of the increased rainfall is that forest fires – an annually recurring plague in Indonesia – are no longer able to take hold in the moist landscape of Samboja Lestari. “Our forest protects itself from fires because it generates a lot of rain,” says Smits. And all that water in Samboja Lestari also turned out to make excellent drinking water. This gave Smits the idea of supplying water to the city of Balikpapan, 30 kilometres away from Samboja Lestari.
Economic heart
Because of the oil platforms off the coast, Balikpapan is the economic heart of Kalimantan. But if nothing is done, within five years the city will have no clean water supply. The seawater surrounding Balikpapan has leached into the fresh water reserves beneath the city.
The mayor therefore took little convincing of the value of Willie Smits’ water project. And Dutch water company WMD was also happy to offer its services. WMD already manages the water supply on the Mullucas and Sulawesi, and Willie Smits’ project made an attractive addition to its Indonesian activities. What’s more, the Dutch foreign ministry was prepared to subsidise the plan to the tune of 20 million euros.
Crystal clear
But how does the water get so clean? In fact, it’s very simple, says Smits – it more or less happens naturally.
“The forest does it, eh – we’ve built lots of very small dams so the water infiltrates the soil as much as possible. Then the roots and the leaf litter on the forest floor filter the water. It then slowly seeps into little streams and by then it’s nice clean water. If it were to flow quickly over the surface it would carry a huge amount of mud with it, and then it would be a lot more expensive to turn it into drinking water.” After it has been purified using membrane techniques and ultraviolet light, the water will then be piped to the city.
Permanent habitat for orangutans
Smits says ultimately the orangutans will also benefit from his drinking water project, because the water will create an excellent reason to leave the forest alone. Smits has tried everything to save Indonesia’s tropical rainforest, the habitat of the orangutans. He has patrolled the forest, and even fired nails into the trees to break the chainsaws of illegal loggers, but to no avail. Smits now hopes that if the local people realise they depend on the forest for their drinking water, they’ll stop cutting it down.
Illegal Trade in Endangered Primates Rampant in Indonesia
October 15, 2008
Source: AFP – October 15, 2008 JAKARTA
The illegal trade in endangered primates is increasing in Indonesia’s East Java province as traders market the animals in public, a conservation expert said Wednesday.
Primates such as slow lorises and Javanese langurs can be bought on the street in Malang, according to Rosek Nursahid, director of the independent animal rights group ProFauna.
“Besides selling the endangered primates on busy public streets, the traders use abusive methods to domesticate the animals,” he said. “The fangs of the slow lorises are pulled … (and) they are forced to be awake during the day, when actually they are nocturnal animals as they hunt their prey at night.
“He said there were no reliable figures on population numbers in the wild but based on the loss of habitat due to rampant deforestation” their numbers are declining fast.
“Buying and selling endangered species is prohibited under Indonesian law and carries sentences of up to five years in prison. ProFauna has reported the Malang primates trade to local authorities but so far nothing has been done to stop it, Nursahid said. Other than primates, ProFauna reported that about 10,000 wild hook-billed parrots were being smuggled out of Halmahera and Talaud Islands annually, destined mainly for the Philippines.
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