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