Orangutan Outreach Website - Saving the Orangutan

Source: Sydney Morning Herald
December 1, 2007

With world leaders preparing to nut out the Kyoto Protocol’s successor, the culture of corruption in Indonesian forestry presents one of the biggest challenges, writes Mark Forbes.

Lashed together four abreast, a raft of illegal logs seems to take forever to snake down a winding, peat-stained stream in Borneo. More than 100 metres wide and guided with a pole by a sullen logger, it drifts through a tropical peat forest, past ramshackle logging camps, the silence broken by a distant chainsaw buzz and occasional tree fall.

Here is the dark heart of the plunder of Indonesia’s forests. Loggers have ravaged the trees, farmers have fire-cleared, and palm-oil companies now want to drain most of the remaining Sungai Putri (”daughter of the river”) forest to plant their lucrative crop.

Police and officials pocket bribes, unconcerned at the fate of this environmental treasure trove. It is populated by endangered orang-utans, who swing above and make their massive nests in the treetops - but those who have to walk its paths sink in the sodden peat-mire below.

Palm oil will bring quick wealth, with promises of greater riches as 57,000 hectares are drained to enable villagers to burn and plant. They know little of global warming here and cannot comprehend that the forest’s peat - rich decayed trees and organic matter between four and 13 metres deep - holds masses of carbon, potentially worth millions of dollars if protected under proposed changes to the Kyoto Protocol.

Scientists calculate that clearing Sungai Putri could release 55 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually. Such forest-related emissions from Indonesia have already made it the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter.

Over the next two weeks in Bali the world’s leaders will begin to forge a new strategy to reduce the growing threat of global warming. They will consider a radical expansion of the Kyoto Protocol to pay countries and companies that exploit forests to protect them instead.

Researchers, environmentalists and developing nations argue that without stopping forest destruction - which accounts for a fifth of all greenhouse emissions - the battle to halt climate change is doomed.

With $US200 million ($226.5 million) from the World Bank to kick-start a global forest carbon protection fund, Indonesia is set to be the world’s test case. If it can reverse practices that have destroyed nearly half its forests, clearing nearly 2 million hectares a year, it hopes to be rewarded with billions of dollars.

The difficulties of changing a culture of corruption and exploitation are immense, but must be faced, says Frances Seymour, the director of the world-leading Centre for International Forestry Research.

Indonesia’s massive forests and peatlands make it the place to begin to address deforestation. “If you agree with Al Gore that we are in a climate emergency and you have to do everything you can about it, then forests have to be part of the answer,” Seymour says.

In the dank Sungai Putri forest, sinewy men such as Tono labour to chainsaw trees, carrying with a workmate the 150-kilogram logs to narrow paths where rickety boards run along the peat. There they are balanced on ageing, steel-reinforced bicycles that are ridden to the stream on a journey that would challenge a circus performer.

He does not enjoy this life, living on rough-hewn platforms above the damp soil for 10 days at a stretch. “It is hard work; these logs are really heavy,” Tono says. “I know I am breaking the law, but I have a family to feed.”

The $5 he earns a day is “far from enough”, he says. “My sons, my grandsons will have to work just like me; I cannot afford education for them.”

Tono would welcome a palm-oil plantation. “They will get rid of the water; I can work there or do farming. In the other villages they have a better life with palm oil: they get money every month, every house has a motorbike.”

Tono and his four-man team see little of the forest’s illicit wealth. The logs they float down the stream are worth 10 times more by the time they reach the timber bosses in the regional capital of Ketapang - 20 times if smuggled on a short boat trip to Malaysia.

In Ketapang those bosses have grand homes and fraternise with local officials. One was invited by police to attend a key government meeting on preventing illegal logging earlier this year.
The family of one of the most senior provincial officials has shares in illegal sawmills and palm-oil companies he has issued with licences. Usually, he demands a $1000 “fee” to help issue a licence.

Although a decree from the Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, bans clearing land with more than three metres of peat, four companies have been issued palm-oil location licences in Sungai Putri.

Indonesia is already the world’s largest producer of palm oil and with demand and prices booming - partly because of its promotion as an environmentally-friendly “biofuel” - at least another 10 million hectares are earmarked.

In the province of West Kalimantan, of the 3 million hectares released for palm-oil plantations, only 10 per cent has been planted. Mostly these logs have been cleared for a quick profit, leaving a

devastated landscape behind. The drained peat is highly susceptible to fires, which release masses of carbon and blanket the region in haze every year.

Such environmental vandalism is neither new nor isolated. In Central Kalimantan sits a denuded, fire-prone 800,000 hectares cleared for a massive rice project by the former Indonesian president Soeharto. Not a grain was grown, but cronies pocketed the logging revenue.

Illegal logging is sanctioned within the Forestry Ministry. Dr Bambang Setiono, a forest finance policy analyst with the Centre for International Forestry Research, estimates Indonesian loggers reap about $US6 billion a year, half from illegal timber.

Official ministry data had defined illegal logs as sourced from the “free market”. Under greater scrutiny, it now uses the term “other legal sources” for suspect logs. With legal and illegal logs deliberately mixed, and the forestry minister viewing any transgressions by companies with logging licences as “administrative violations”, prosecutions are difficult unless authorities follow the money trail.

About $US3 billion from illegal logging is laundered each year through banks, with money regularly flowing back to Forestry Ministry and district officials.

In Sumatra province this year a police crackdown seized more than 1 million illegally cut logs linked to large pulp companies. Prosecutions have been hampered by Forestry Ministry officials, including the minister, Malem Sambat Kaban.

The Herald has obtained letters from Kaban urging police to abandon their investigations. One letter was instrumental in the release in October of one of Indonesia’s most notorious timber barons, Adelin Lis, who immediately fled overseas for a second time.

In an endorsement requested by Lis’s lawyer, Hotman Paris, Kaban stated Lis had committed only administrative violations.

A second letter to North Sumatra’s police chief, governor and chief prosecutor criticises police for pursuing large logging companies. They should be supported as they “employ many workers and their existence provides significant social and economic effects”, Kaban wrote.
Companies that held logging concessions could not be criminals, as any breaches were administrative, he states. “In order to avoid the excess of operations towards illegal logging that blocked operations of legitimate permit holders” police should leave any sanctions to the ministry, Kaban urges.

Although Kaban’s ministry would be responsible for overseeing and enforcing forest protection under Indonesia’s proposal to the Bali conference, he continues to emphasise the needs of the pulp and paper industry. “The investment has reached $US25 billion; this needs a continued supply of raw materials.”

Indonesia’s Environment Minister, Rachmat Witoelar, will preside over the Bali conference and says it is essential the meeting endorses the REDD (Reducing Environmental Deforestation and Degradation) scheme, as part of the new, post-Kyoto regime and immediately approve Indonesian pilot projects. Asked how he could guarantee forest protection when the forestry minister seems to be part of the problem, Witoelar replies: “Touche.”

“It is highly embarrassing,” he says, adding that many of Kaban’s claims are true but it creates a damaging “psychological position”.

Things must change, Witoelar says. “I have to integrate the positions as Indonesia has a lack of credibility.”

Protecting forests such as Sungai Putri from palm-oil plantations is an uphill battle, he admits. “There is a long way to go but we will use the incentives and disincentives that come from global funding.

“First of all we must try and insist the district leaders are not part of the crime and I am for catching them and putting them in jail,” Witoelar says.

“Then the local population are complaining they have no subsistence. Let’s give them subsistence.”

If the forest protection program is to work, Seymour says, funds must flow to the locals, but the scheme will face corruption and other moral challenges. “This isn’t going to be easy,” she says. “Do we want to pay illegal loggers to stop their illegal activities? That doesn’t feel right.

“There will be trade-offs between equity and efficiency. It may be the most potent investments will be giving funds or investing in activities that appear to benefit the bad guys, not the good guys.”

Joe Leitmann, the World Bank’s environment co-ordinator for Indonesia, does not underestimate the difficulties, but says solutions must be found. The bank’s $US200 million fund is intended to iron out some of the issues in practice.

“One in five tons of carbon emitted comes from the forests,” Leitmann says. “We want to kick-start this very, very important market.”

It was a similar World Bank scheme that began the global trade in carbon credits for cuts to industrial emissions, now worth more than $US30 billion a year.

Under the new program, countries such as Indonesia would earn carbon credits for halting deforestation, which could be sold to companies and other countries to help meet their targets for cuts in emissions.

The value of those carbon credits would depend on Indonesia’s credibility in enforcing carbon protection and complex measurement schemes estimating the amount of carbon preserved. And the only body equipped for the job is the heavily compromised Forestry Ministry.

Seymour says her organisation “and pretty much all the organisations that care about forests face a moral hazard, because on the one hand it’s great - we have new political attention, new money to do what we do - and on the other hand we know better than anyone else how hard this is going to be”.

She prefers to focus on the positive, taking heart from two forward-thinking provincial governors embracing the radical shift. Aceh’s Irwandi Yusuf and Papua’s Barnabas Suebu have announced a moratorium on forest-clearing licences before the Bali conference.

Thousands of forest rangers would be employed to implement environmentally friendly
policies, they pledged in a joint statement.

Witoelar also applauds the moves. “The value of the 20-odd million hectares in Papua is so much that Bas Suebu can expect to have so many billion dollars for keeping himself honest,” he says.

The cost of the scheme is projected to rocket and Seymour says this links the two big issues for the Bali conference: incorporating forests in the successor to the Kyoto Protocol and the scale of cuts countries such as Australia are prepared to adopt - bigger cuts will stimulate demand.

The looming debate will be too late to stop the logging or help feed his children, Tono predicts. “For years we hear about programs for the forests, money through the government,” he says. “But it never reaches us.”

Check out the source of this post— the Greenpeace UK blog:

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/forests/the-myth-of-sustainable-palm-oil-20071128

Last week, Sainsbury’s announced that it aims to use only sustainable palm oil in its own-brand products. Sounds great, and with Asda having made a similar announcement earlier this year, you might think supermarkets will soon be stocking only those palm oil products that weren’t helping to cause the indiscriminate destruction of forests in places like Indonesia. The truth is that, while both companies score top marks for excellent intentions, delivery is going to be decidedly tricky as there is currently no credible way of telling whether palm oil is ’sustainable’ or not.

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) - the industry-led consortium of which Asda and Sainsbury’s are members - met in Malaysia last week to adopt their global standards for what constitutes sustainable palm oil. Their goal is to have a certification scheme that will allow products to carry an RSPO logo if the palm oil meets certain environmental and social justice criteria, rather like the one run by the Forest Stewardship Council for timber and paper.

We’ve pointed out the current flaws in the RSPO system before and the good news is that since then they haven’t been weakened; unfortunately, they haven’t been tightened up either. For instance, there’s little to stop companies having certain parts of their operations certified by the RSPO while they continue to convert rainforests and peatlands into oil palm plantations elsewhere, giving them a green fig leaf to cover up their terrible environmental standards.

So the ambitions of Sainsbury’s are a good step forward as they plan to get their palm oil from Colombia instead of South East Asia, but it will still be the RSPO providing the rubber stamp of sustainability. With RSPO-labelled products appearing in a supermarket near you from sometime next year, there’ll still be no way to tell good palm oil from bad.

So to put more pressure on palm oil companies, at the weekend not one but two shipments of palm oil were blocked from coming into European ports by Greenpeace teams. On Friday, a tanker carrying 10,000 tonnes of the stuff from Indonesia - supplied by a company connected to trashing forests and peatlands - was prevented from unloading in Rotterdam.

On Sunday another 10,000 tonnes were stopped from entering Porvoo in Finland. This shipment was heading for the world’s first large-scale production facility for biodiesel made with palm oil and the owners, Neste Oil, wants to become the leading producer of ‘renewable diesel’. There are photos from the action on Greenpeace Finland’s Flickr profile.

We’ll be taking similar steps to stop the destruction of Indonesia’s forests and peatlands in the near future - watch this space.

By Mark Forbes

THE boss drapes across a branch, languidly extending a massive bronze-fringed arm to bend a 15-metre tall tree close and stuff a handful of leaves in his mouth.

Unperturbed, the baleful brown eyes of this dominant male orangutan stare down. It is our Indonesian illegal logger guides who appear awestruck - “besar (big)”, they whisper, “he the boss”.

One of more than 500 endangered orangutans in a newly-discovered population in Indonesian Borneo, West Kalimantan, the boss is blissfully unaware of plans to clear this tropical peat forest for a palm oil plantation. Unaware that his territory sits at the centre of a pivotal global debate at next week’s climate change conference in Bali.

Global warming might just save the boss and his ecosystem. Not only are environmentalists outraged by the possible destruction, but these trees spring from carbon-rich, metres-deep peat - potentially worth millions under a proposed post-Kyoto Protocol deal to pay for the preservation of forests.

Clearing peat forests has made Indonesia the world’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter, sending more than 3000 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a year. It is driven by greed, with palm oil and timber barons lining the pockets of officials from Kalimantan to Jakarta - even Indonesia’s Forestry Minister has blocked prosecution of illegal loggers.

Already the boss’s Sungai Putri (Daughter of the River) Forest has been shrunk by logging and burn-offs for farming. Now the district administration has issued initial permits to plant oil palm across more than two thirds of its 57,000 hectares - despite a presidential decree banning clearing such peatlands.

It amounts to a death sentence for the forest’s 500 to 800 orangutans, according to Frank Momberg, Asia director of Fauna and Flora International, which has just documented the area.

“They would be wiped out, the remaining forest would be too small to maintain a viable population,” Mr Momberg said.

Plantations would sever a peat corridor to the nearby Gunung Palung National Park, where the orangutan population is also under threat from encroachments by illegal logging. Robbed of their natural food, the apes have begun descending into villagers’ vegetable gardens. Many have been shot, especially the mothers, and babies sold.

These vulnerable peat and lowland forests are the frontline in the orangutans’ battle for survival, Mr Momberg says.

Travelling along Sungai Putri’s tiny paths and streams Fauna and Flora’s research team discovered many large, two-metre wide orangutan nests woven of vines and leaves in the canopy. Each day orangutans forage for food then build a new nest to spend the next night.

The team also discovered several other endangered plants and animals, including Proboscis Monkeys and carnivorous pitcher plants, which are large enough to trap and devour frogs.

“This is high conservation value forest, not just because of the endangered species, but this peat is like a giant sponge, holding fresh water and storing masses of carbon,” Mr Momberg said. “It’s providing an active environmental service to the world.”

Mr Momberg believes the boss and his brethren can be saved, with the final stage of issuing plantation permits pending.

He is attempting to convince the provincial regent to accept European and private funds to protect the forest, in a forerunner of post-Kyoto programs to be unveiled in Bali this month.

A new forest warden scheme in the nearby national park, employing loggers, has drastically reduced exploitation, Mr Momberg said.

“Local government and local people involved in illegal logging have to benefit or you won’t reduce deforestation,” he said. “But it’s not too late.”

November 30, 2007

Photo by Juan Pablo Moreiras
Source: http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/one-last-chance-for-the-boss/2007/11/30/1196394626940.html

By Krista Mahr/Riau

On a recent humid morning in Riau, a province on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, a young man named Suranto wakes early on a Sunday, wraps a red T shirt around his head and ambles off to the fields to work. Suranto isn’t a local; he has come from northern Sumatra because there are jobs in Riau. The forests and peatlands of the area are being transformed into plantations, and workers are being paid to plant tens of thousands of young oil-palm trees in fields stripped bare of their native vegetation by burning. As Suranto stoops and digs one hole after another amid the blackened stumps of an old tropical forest, he looks like a camp follower picking through the detritus of a still-smoldering battlefield.

Which is exactly what Riau province is, in a way. Roughly the size of Taiwan, the area has become the focus of a green-versus-green tussle pitting environmentalists trying to protect Indonesia’s disappearing forests against a fast-growing alternative-energy business. Palm oil, a byproduct of the oil-palm tree such as those being planted in Riau, is used for cooking and as a food additive. Growing it has long been a big business in Southeast Asia. But it can also be used in the production of a relatively clean-burning alternative fuel: biodiesel. As oil prices have soared in recent years, Indonesian companies have been converting vast tracts of forests and peat bogs into palm-oil plantations to feed a rapidly expanding biodiesel industry; between 1995 and 2005, the amount of Indonesian land being used to grow oil palms increased by some 8.6 million acres (3.5 million hectares), more than doubling total plantation area, according to a recent report on the industry by Credit Suisse.

The biodiesel boom has a high environmental cost, however. Critics say it’s contributing to global warming. Tropical forests help remove millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. Burning and clear-cutting not only eliminates one of the planet’s crucial air-filtration systems, the process also releases even more carbon dioxide into the air, in smoke or as gases released during the decomposition of forest waste. Annual clearing of Indonesia’s carbon-rich peatlands alone releases some 1.8 billion tons of greenhouse gases, according to a Greenpeace report. Indonesia is the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases behind the U.S. and China, says the World Bank. “We liken what’s going on [in Indonesia] to pouring petrol on a fire,” says Martin Baker, a Hong Kong–based communications officer for Greenpeace International. “It’s completely ridiculous to produce green fuels from places like this.”

It doesn’t seem so ridiculous to poor countries like Indonesia, where leaders are torn between the need to develop the country’s natural resources and increasing international pressure to preserve remaining forests. This dilemma is expected to be a hot topic this month at a U.N.-led conference on climate change in Bali, where representatives from 189 nations are gathering to negotiate a set of environmental rules to succeed the Kyoto protocols, the main provisions of which expire in 2012.

With 20% of the world’s emissions coming from carbon released into the atmosphere via deforestation, one of the more controversial ideas to be floated at the conference will likely be a proposal to create an international carbon-trading system that would, in effect, allow countries such as Indonesia to be paid for not cutting down their forests. Although details have yet to be hammered out, the concept is similar to a European Union carbon-trading system that sets limits on greenhouse-gas emissions, allowing companies exceeding those limits to buy “credits” from companies that produce less than their fair share of pollutants. Thus, heavy polluters are penalized (they have to pay for credits to stay within the cap), while greener groups are rewarded (they get paid for being under the cap), and the continent as a whole meets its emission targets.

But the plan has plenty of skeptics. The United Nations on Nov. 27 released a report questioning whether the carbon-trading system established under the Kyoto protocols is working. Moreover, it’s unclear if developing countries would go along with such a proposal. Due to illegal logging as well as the clearing of land for farming and other uses, Indonesia has been losing between 3.7 million and 4.7 million acres (between 1.5 million and 1.9 million hectares) of trees annually for the past 10 years, a deforestation rate that is among the fastest in the world. In other words, razing forests is a big business — and carbon credits might not provide an adequate substitute for the profits that come from converting fallow land to income-producing ventures like palm-oil plantations.

And even if the government signs on to the program, ordinary Indonesians might not. Indonesian authorities in the past have found it difficult to control illegal logging and land-clearing because much of it takes place in remote areas of the vast Indonesian archipelago, beyond the reach of the law. “Even if you have money coming in, how [is the government] going to be able to assert control in these frontier places?” asks Rod Taylor, WWF International’s forests program director. Indonesia’s Minister of Forestry, M.S. Kaban, says this problem has been solved. “The burning is stopped. Our people are very committed,” Kaban says. He notes that there were more than 7,000 criminal cases brought against illegal loggers in 2005; the crackdown has been so effective that the caseload plummeted to 616 in 2006. “I believe that in 2007, [illegal logging] cases will be very, very few,” Kaban says.

That may be so — but as long as there is demand for biodiesel, it seems unrealistic to expect Indonesia to stop converting forests into plantations. These days, Riau’s main highway is clogged with trucks carting processed palm oil from local refineries to the Sumatran port town of Dumai. Outside one house, not far from the provincial capital of Pekanbaru, a woman weighing out heavy red palm fruit on a scale in her front yard says her family used to only sell fruit from their 200 palm trees. But with the high prices palm oil fetches these days, she says her family members have gone into business as middlemen for the industry, helping other small growers sell to larger plantations. “We were able to move up,” she says.

It’s success stories like this one that will bedevil those attending the Bali conference. One of the central issues will be how to justly allocate the economic burden of reducing greenhouse emissions among industrialized countries — which have grown rich fouling the air and using up natural resources — and developing countries like China, India and Indonesia. “We have to be careful about asking developing countries to lock up their forests,” says Taylor of the WWF. That is, at least until the world has found a way to make locking up the forests pay.

Nov. 28, 2007
Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1688893,00.html

Indonesia, which has been losing its forests at a rapid pace in recent years, has launched a campaign to plant 79 million trees ahead of next month’s UN climate change conference in Bali.

“We have been negligent in the past, now we have to get our act together,” President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said to state news agency Antara, adding he had planted saplings on the outskirts of Jakarta.

The drive is part of a global campaign to plant one billion trees launched at UN climate change talks in Nairobi last year.

Forestry ministry officials said 79 million saplings were collected from local governments around the archipelago and they planned to complete the planting in one day.

Participants from 189 countries are expected to gather in Bali in next month to discuss a new deal to fight global warming. The existing pact, the Kyoto Protocol, runs out in 2012.

Fastest deforestation pace

According to Greenpeace, Indonesia had the fastest pace of deforestation in the world between 2000-2005, with an area of forest equivalent to 300 soccer pitches destroyed every hour.

Mr Yudhoyono said that illegal loggers and their financers were “common enemies” and must be brought to justice.

South-East Asia’s biggest economy is also among the world’s top three greenhouse gas emitters because of deforestation, peatland degradation, and forest fires, according to a recent report sponsored by the World Bank and Britain’s development arm.

Environmental groups are concerned that rapidly expanding palm oil plantations, partly driven by ambitious plans for biofuels, are damaging the country’s rainforests.

One billion trees planted across the world

Meanwhile, the UN says the world has surpassed a United Nations goal of planting one billion trees in 2007 to help slow climate change, led by huge forestry projects in Ethiopia and Mexico.

The global tree-planting drive, inspired by Kenyan environmentalist and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, is meant to counter deforestation from logging and the burning of forests to create farmland.

Ethiopia and Mexico lead the way

UNEP said Ethiopia appeared to be the runaway leader with 700 million trees planted in a national reforestation drive. Only three per cent of Ethiopia is now forested, down from 40 per cent centuries ago.

Other top planters were Mexico with 217 million trees, Turkey 150 million, Kenya 100 million, Cuba 96.5 million, Rwanda 50 million, South Korea 43 million, Tunisia 21 million, Morocco 20 million, Burma 20 million and Brazil 16 million, it said.

The billion-tree target was set in Nairobi in November despite criticism that it would be impossible to verify. It was declared passed less than a week before the start of a December 3-14 meeting of the world’s environment ministers in Bali.

“You responded beyond our dreams,” said Maathai. “Now we must keep the pressure on and continue the good work for the planet. Plant another tree today in celebration.”

China, Guatemala and Spain were expected soon to announce new plantings of millions of trees, UNEP said.

UNEP says it checks planting pledges, which now cover 1.5 billion trees, to see if they sound credible but does not ensure all are planted. It said the totals were still being collated.

Source: SBS staff with agencies
29 November, 2007
http://naca.sbs.com.au/worldnewsaustralia/indonesia_plants_trees_ahead_of_bali__136579

By Kimberley D. Mok, Auroville, India on 11.28.07
Source: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/11/southeast_asia_palm_oil.php

Image: Small part of the bigger picture - deforestation in Borneo, Indonesia (World Resources Institute)

In its annual Human Development Report released yesterday, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) highlighted the untenable environmental impacts of palm oil production. As a supposedly environmentally-friendly biofuel and healthier food ingredient, the demand for palm oil has risen steadily in recent years and can be found anywhere from cookies to cosmetics – yet, as we’ve shown on TH before (again and again), it is becoming clear that palm oil comes with a pretty heavy ecological cost.

“Expansion of cultivation of (oil palm) in East Asia has been associated with widespread deforestation and violation of human rights of indigenous people,” states the report, which singles out top producers Indonesia and Malaysia as countries where - in addition to deforestation and indigenous conflicts - palm oil production has also resulted in the destruction of key habitats of endangered primates.

“As a result of deforestation, some of which is for palm oil, Indonesia is the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, after the USA and China,” continues the report. “Deforestation to make way for large-scale mono-cropping of energy crops obliterates the ‘green credentials’ of the biofuel.”

The UNDP report cautions that other Asian countries – notably Burma, Thailand and Cambodia to Vietnam and the Philippines – should take a long hard look at the full environmental costs of palm oil production in Indonesia and Malaysia before they decide to go down the same road.

Already, the 2005 figures for the global cultivation of palm oil is estimated at around 12 million hectares, double the area back in 1997. Indonesia plans to convert even more peatland forests to palm oil and this year, signed no less than 58 agreements all worth $12.4 billion (US) to produce 200,000 barrels of oil-equivalent biofuel per day by 2010.

According to environmental observers, destroying these forests will not only mean less carbon sinks, but will also release the carbon stored in them into the atmosphere. “Peatland forests are traditional carbon storehouses. Typically they store up to 30 percent carbon dioxide,” says Shailendra Yashwant, climate and energy campaigner for the South-east Asia office of Greenpeace.

The report’s findings are expected to be one of the hotly debated issues in next month’s climate change summit organized by the UN and hosted in Bali, Indonesia, with delegates from 180 nations expected to attend.

By Paul Eccleston
28/11/2007

Secret filming by villagers has revealed the damage being caused to the Indonesian rainforests by uncontrolled logging and palm oil plantations.

Visit this story at telegraph.co.uk to view photos and video.

# In pictures: Papua natives learn to use the equipment
# Watch interviews with tribes: Tears of Mother Mooi | Defenders of the Tribal Boundaries

The ancient way of life of natives in Papua is being threatened by the wholesale destruction of their forests.

The Indonesian province is inaccessible to outsiders and closed to journalists so it was left to the villagers to expose the activities of the logging companies.

They were given digital camera equipment and taught how to use it by the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), which investigates and exposes environmental and wildlife crime, working with the Jakarta-based NGO Telapak.

The two conservation groups have been working with tribal communities in Papua to help them protect their forests from unsustainable exploitation and illegal logging.

A series of films released simultaneously in London and Jakarta, show the scale of destruction being caused to the forests which the villagers rely on almost entirely for food and shelter.

One was shot by the Mooi people who live in the Sorong regency of West Papua. It shows the relationship between the Mooi and their dependence on the forest lands and features undercover filming of logging.

Once a stretch of forest has been stripped bare it is replaced with palm oil plantations but in the process much of the wildlife - pigs, deer and birds which the villagers rely on for food - is driven out.
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The film questions whether the logging began even before a licence was granted for 32,000 hectares of Mooi land to be turned over for plantation in 2006.

The film shows workers clearing the ancient forests with chain saws before bulldozers move in to level it for palm trees to be planted.

Mooi women in the film say the destruction of vast swathes of their forest make it more difficult for them to continue with their traditional weaving crafts making household items and sleeping mats from tree bark.

And tribal hunters say they now have to travel great distances to find game where previously it was abundant in their forests.

Another film shot in the Prafi plain, in the Arfak region of Manokwari regency in West Papua Province tells of the consequences of state-sponsored palm oil plantations.

Senior community figures were sent by the government to Medan in Sumatra in 1982 to bring oil palm back to their area. The film shows the consequences to local people who lose their rights to the land and see it destroyed.

Promises that palm oil would sustain them for generations fail to materialise and the plantations fall into neglect as they become unprofitable.

Villagers tell in the film how their rivers have been polluted by discharges of undiluted palm oil from a factory and how they develop rashes when they wash in it.

Ananias Muid, one of the villagers sent to learn about palm oil admits he now regrets the communities’ involvement with it.

Paul Redman, who has worked on projects for EIA in Indonesia for five years, said: “These are the voices of local people, the voices of the forest - explaining the issues that directly affect them and their lives.

“They are films made by Papuans, about Papua - they are the real thing. They were researched, written and filmed by them.”

Some of the film-makers’ identities have been kept secret because of security concerns. “These people have worked extremely hard to bring these films together, sometimes at great personal risk.

“For example, one film-maker waited for four days in the forest to get footage of illegal loggers. Logging is a multi-million pound industry which impacts upon where they live.

“For them, the forest is their supermarket - when it is gone they have nothing and no access to any income either.

“They want these stories to be told and these stories have to be told - without their land, they have no hope.”

Source: telegraph.co.uk

Indonesia’s rapidly disappearing forests are one of the examples of environmental damage to be dealt with at the United Nations climate change conference next month on the island of Bali. The destruction poses a threat to plant and animal life, including the endangered orangutan. Once found throughout Asia, the red ape is now only found on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and the island of Borneo, which is shared by Malaysia and Brunei. VOA’s Nancy-Amelia Collins reports….
Greenpeace, other environmental groups and UN statistics say Indonesia rivals Brazil for the world’s highest rate of deforestation. They estimate Indonesia loses 300 football fields of forest every hour to palm oil (dubbed “deforestation diesel” by Greenpeace).

In Riau, on Sumatra island, large swathes of forest are being cleared to make way for palm oil plantations.

A protestor says: “Greenpeace is here in Riau to show the destruction to Indonesian forests for palm oil plantations. The damage done not only destroys the forest but also animal habitats and causes greenhouse gas emissions which trigger climate change.”

Demand is soaring for palm oil-derived biodiesel, partly because it has been marketed as an environmentally friendly source of power.

But environmentalists say not enough thought has been given to how it is made. They say the burning of carbon-rich peat lands to make way for palm oil plantations causes huge amounts of carbon dioxide to be released into the air, which contributes to global climate change.

The destruction also impacts the vast variety of Indonesia’s wildlife, such as the orangutan, once prevalent in Asia, and now only found on Sumatra island and Borneo.

Bustar Maitar, Greenpeace forest solution campaigner, says deforestation also hurts local communities severely.

“The local people still have a relationship with the forest,” Bustar says. “So when the palm oil plantation comes, it destroys their way of life.”

Indonesia and Malaysia together produce more than 80 percent of the world’s palm oil, widely used in consumer products.

# posted by Confidential Reporter

Source: Reuters Canada

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Might we see “Meerkat Manor: The Video Game?”

Discovery Communications is partnering with the second-biggest U.S. video games publisher Activision Inc to make animal-themed games, Discovery Chief Executive David Zaslav told the Reuters Media Summit on Wednesday.

Activision will make the games for several game systems, with the titles tied to Discovery’s Animal Planet channel, which airs popular shows such as “Meerkat Manor” and “Orangutan Island.”

A Discovery spokesman initially said that games would be based on those shows, but the company later told Reuters that no decisions had been made yet on specific titles.

Financial terms were not disclosed. The deal lets Discovery tap one of the fastest-growing segments of the entertainment industry, one that is seeing an explosion of games that appeal to younger and older players outside the core audience of teenage boys.

“We are really trying to get away from being a cable company and into being a content company,” Zaslav said. Discovery Communications is owned by Discovery Holding Co, Advance/Newhouse Communications and its founder, John S. Hendricks.

The nature games are expected to be released in late 2008.

Activision is riding high on strong sales of its original games like “Guitar Hero 3″ but also has a strong portfolio of titles based on licensed properties such as “Spider-Man” and “Transformers.”

(Reporting by Scott Hillis; editing by John Wallace)

Source: Reuters Canada

Clunes filmmaker Cathy Henkel on location in Borneo with an orangutan while filming her new feature documentary, The Burning Season.

“This is a cliffhanger moment for us, for the film and for the planet,” said Clunes filmmaker Cathy Henkel just 24 hours before boarding a plane to Bali to film the UN Climate Change Conference.

The meeting of world leaders will form an integral part of Cathy’s 90-minute documentary, The Burning Season, which follows one man on a mission to shape the next phase of the Kyoto Protocol and change the course of history.

For the last 12 months Cathy and her partner Jeff Canin have been filming Tibetan/Australian entrepreneur Dorjee Sun, who has devised a carbon trading scheme that could save Indonesia’s tropical rainforests and bring the orangutan back from the brink of extinction.

Every year in Indonesia vast tracts of rainforest are logged and burned to make way for palm oil production, a practice which generates massive amounts of greenhouse pollution and kills 4000 orangutans each year. If left unchecked, these endangered animals will be extinct within a decade.

But Dorjee has a solution.

He convinced three Indonesian governors to halt the logging of thousands of hectares of rainforest, earning them income from the sale of carbon credits to large companies in the US, Europe and Asia that want to offset their greenhouse gas emissions.

The concept is called ‘avoided deforestation’ and Dorjee is now on his way to Bali, with Cathy and her film crew in tow, to lobby for it to be included in the next round of Kyoto. The next round will take effect in 2012.

“When we start getting mandatory emission limits, companies who are not able to reach those targets can offset their carbon emissions by buying into a fund that will prevent the logging of these rainforests,” Cathy said. “This deal is ground-breaking… given that 20 per cent of global emissions come from the burning and logging of forests, this concept has huge potential if adopted globally. It means big emitting companies can become active players in protecting rainforest all over the world.”

Australia’s largest carbon trading deal to date was made last year when Lismore company The Carbon Pool sold around one million tonnes of carbon credits to Rio Tinto Aluminium. The deal saved more than 12,000 hectares of native forest in Queensland, and managing director Mark Jackson has now merged his business with Dorjee’s company, Carbon Conservation.

“Avoided deforestation is attractive for developing countries because they’re getting paid large sums of money through international carbon markets to protect and expand their forests,” said Mark. “In a world ruled by economy, this is the best chance we have to save our jungles and the species, such as rhinos and tigers, who inhabit them. It’s also helping to alleviate poverty in some of the poorest nations on earth.”

Whilst in Bali, Cathy will also have the opportunity to film Australia’s new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, as he makes his first major appearance on the world stage. She describes his intention to ratify the Kyoto Protocol as “historic”.

“Saturday’s election was a win for the planet - not just a win for Australia,” said Cathy. “Australia signing Kyoto is a very important gesture in terms of leaving the US completely isolated as the only country that hasn’t signed up. It gives us an opportunity to truly take a lead in Asia and in the world to tackle climate change. Without signing it we’re irrelevant in the debate.”

Cathy said attending the UN Climate Change Conference was a once-in-a-lifetime gig.

“For me this is an opportunity to be at the epicentre of one of the biggest meetings on the planet - a meeting that will decide the future of our planet,” said Cathy. “I’m nervous that this might be a missed opportunity and that will set the carbon trading scheme back 10 years - and we just don’t have that much time. Climate change scientists tell us humans don’t have that much time and we know that the orangutans definitely don’t. If we wait any longer the orangutans and the forests will be lost forever.”

•The Burning Season will be completed in April 2007 and broadcast on ABC later in the year. The film has also been purchased by the BBC and CBC (Canada) and will be distributed worldwide by National Geographic. A cinema release is also being considered.

The making of The Burning Season has not all been smooth sailing for Cathy and Jeff as it has taken 10 months to get finance. Believing so strongly in the urgency of the film, they decided to take a chance and use their own resources to keep filming. This involved two trips to Indonesia and one around the USA. At one point, in late August, it looked like they were unable to keep going. However, after seeing some footage from the film, local angels Christopher and Lynda Dean came to their rescue. Their support kept the production afloat until the film was fully financed in late November.

Cathy’s 15-year-old daughter Samlara Henkel who has been invited to the UN Climate Change Conference to report on it for the NSW Department of Education.

• Cathy and Jeff’s 15-year-old daughter Samlara, who has been active in the climate debate for over 12 months and even addressed Lismore Council last year about her concerns, has been invited by the NSW Education Department to host a live webcast that will be streamed to several NSW schools, including Kadina High, during the first week of the conference. Samlara’s reports will then be made available next year as a download to all NSW schools as an educational resource.