Last great wilderness gets the chop in Kalimantan

Last great wilderness gets the chop in Kalimantan

By Fred Pearce

LONDON: Loggers have torn through a "natural laboratory" the
size of the Isle of Wight, wrecking the efforts of international
researchers to monitor tropical peat-swamp forests. As hundreds
of men with chainsaw forced their way through her domain in
Indonesian Borneo earlier this month, British biologist Nichola
Waldes stood amid the wreckage of the laboratory's most precious
corner, a germ plasm reserve where all the main local plants had
been gathered for research.

"The whole plot is just massacred," she said. It is littered
with broken wood and toppled trunks. Metal tags that once marked
every sapling are strewn around. The broken forest is criss-
crossed by ramshackle wooden railways and canals, installed by
the loggers as they push ever deeper into the swamp. On the far
bank of the River Sebangau, thousands of logs are lashed together
in a giant raft floating beside a sawmill. More logs head
downstream to plywood factories and pulp mills.

Welcome to Central Kalimantan, the most remote province in
Indonesian Borneo. It's the size of England with a population
less than that of Essex and the local phone book lists six times
as many sawmills as taxi firms.

The natural laboratory is the focus for an international
effort to study tropical peat-swamp forests, begun by Jack
Rieley, senior research fellow in the department of geography in
the University of Nottingham, and backed by the British
Government's Darwin Initiative, a fund to investigate and protect
biodiversity. But the forest is disappearing faster than it can
be monitored.

Why should we on the other side of the world really care? The
answer is the peat-swamps' role in slowing global warming. They
are soaking up carbon dioxide -- the gas that causes global
warming -- as effectively as they soak up water. They also hold
masses of carbon that will swill right back into the atmosphere
if they are destroyed. A square kilometer of swamp contains as
much carbon as is emitted each year by pollution from a city of
100,000 people. The swamps may hold more carbon than the world's
fossil fuel burning emits in four years. A loss of five
centimeters a year from the peat layer will release more than 100
million tones of carbon a year into the atmosphere.

The wreckers of Waldes's germ plasm reserve were not hard to
find. About a dozen paddled into the reserve along a new canal.

They came in three canoes, with their lunch and a couple of
chainsaw, stopping next to a thick log of red meranti, ready for
the sawmill. The leader, Mr Udin, said they had been in the area
for three months. He claimed not to know the forest was protected
for science. Who was his boss? He shrugged.

"It is dangerous to confront these people. They have police
protection," said Waldes. So we chatted over our picnics as a
snake plopped into the water close by. The loggers eventually
headed off back down the canal, chainsaw still stowed.

Despite the ravages of forest fires 18 months ago, Central
Kalimantan is still the most heavily forested part of Borneo.

Many of the forests sit on top of the largest, oldest and
deepest tropical peat-swamps in the world, covering an area a
quarter the size of England.

Once, this boggy terrain was ignored. But the nine months
since the Indonesian economy went into free-fall have seen an
orgy of illegal logging. "There appears to be a conspiracy in
Central Kalimantan to extract all the saleable timber as quickly
as possible," says Rieley.

Mafia-style organizations are shipping in thousands of
unemployed men from neighboring islands. "Groups of up to 200 men
are living in small sections of the forest, felling trees," says
Rieley. I saw several teams of Javanese men jammed in trucks up
and down the new trans-Kalimantan highway, which ploughs through
the swamp. They join tens of thousands of "transmigrant" families
moved by the government from densely-populated Java over the past
20 years. Many have taken up logging, gold mining and other
illegal activities.

The British Government has put a lot of aid into central
Kalimantan to research ways of making legal forestry more
environmentally friendly. But little legal logging activity is
left.

Says Rieley: "These expensive research projects are
meaningless without effective control in the forests themselves.

There is an air of corruption reaching from the lowest
official to the highest reaches of the Ministry of Forestry in
Jakarta that is providing business interests with the freedom to
pillage."

The tropical peat-swamps are small compared with the great
peat- swamp wastes of northern Canada or Siberia. But they are
ecologically very different. Cold-land peat is made from moss;
tropical peat is made from forest debris that cannot decompose in
the stagnant swamp water and is thick with bits of ancient wood.

At least half of the world's tropical peat-swamps are in
Indonesia. Some, as Rieley and Suwido Limin, his local
collaborator from the University of Palangkaraya, have found, are
more than 10,000 years old - the oldest anywhere.

Unlike cold peat swamps, they are rich in biodiversity.
Sharing the natural laboratory with loggers and scientists are
sun bears and clouded leopards and 30 other mammal and 150 bird
species, as well as plants and fish seen nowhere else. The
Central Kalimantan peat swamp forests could be the largest single
home for orangutans, housing 5,000 or more of the 15,000
estimated to remain in the wild.

This is a critical moment for the peat swamps. Rieley wants to
use the natural laboratory to help draw up an integrated
conservation and development plan. Lukas Tingkes, the local
director of the government planning agency, BAPPEDA, says:
"Development has to be based on using our natural resources to
meet local people's needs and without destroying the environment.
If we do that, I am optimistic about the future."

But the truth is that a chainsaw in Borneo today is a license
to print money. And, with the eclipse of many of President
Soeharto's cronies who ran the old legal concessions, a new
generation of mafia-style operators is in charge. Casual logging
workers get paid Rp 40,000 a day (about US$4.65), six times the
government daily rate. One independent logger said he gets Rp
190,000 for a cubic metre of ramin or red meranti. The middlemen
get four times as much in Jakarta. But if this goes on, says
Rieley, it will "lead to the complete loss of this ecosystem".

The formation of tropical peat-swamps may have trapped enough
carbon to help trigger ice ages. To release that carbon now, as
the world struggles to counter global warming, seems folly
indeed.

Later on, in another exclusive report, Fred Pearce meets the
scientists who are warning of a "meltdown" of Indonesia's
biological diversity. Since its currency collapsed early last
year, Indonesia has been selling its priceless natural assets --
its forests and wildlife -- at knock-down prices.

-- Guardian News Service