More from Indonesia

Here's another Indonesia update that Tim requested me to post on his behalf.

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To follow on from Jeneen’s description of Indonesia, the car trip to North Buton was completed at a painstaking 16 km/hour average over 100 kms along a road which in some cases is actually washed by the sea at high tide. Arriving there on the Friday morning meant that the offices of the KSDA and Forestry Departments were locked as staff had not returned following the national public holiday on Thursday. However we did find people at the district planning office (BAPPEDA) and the district Environment Office whose head was the ex-head of the Forestry Department. For him, we obtained a quite different impression on the state of pressure on the forest reserves from that of Lambusango.

Firstly, the north of Buton Island is relatively flat and access to the forest is relatively easy – quite the opposite of Lambusango. Secondly there are numerous landing/loading places for timber illegally extracted from the reserve and production forests. And thirdly, since the district was newly formed in 2007/8 by dividing one district into two, the local Government has been very much concerned in establishing new government structures and units. There has been a mini boom in construction which has given employment to many workers and contractors (and a demand for timber). However, the efforts in protection of the forest and law enforcement have been poor. Everyone seems to know that illegal timber extraction is taking place with either disregard or involvement on the part of authorities. In particular there is a black tropical hardwood (gito gito in local language) which only comes from the reserve and is in high demand from either Kupang or Surabaya. We actually passed three trucks loaded with this at night on our way to North Buton.

There is very little NGO activity relating to conservation per se, but a local NGO called APDK with whom we met described the AusAid support at village level under the Australian Community Development and Civil Society Strengthening Scheme (ACCESS Phase II) in the areas of small scale credit, education, health, water, sanitation, etc.

There has been little (if any) spill-over of the experience in Lambusango, the neighbouring district. There is a low perception of environment matters, and our Head of Environment knew nothing of the Community Forest Management Forum established under the GEF/Operation Wallacea project. However, there is no clear felling of timber in the reserves or forest areas, as trees are selectively felled (spotting), and there is no pressure on animal or bird populations due as there is no significant trade.

After repeating the 100 kms road journey and spending the night in BauBau, we returned to Jakarta on the Saturday morning.

This week is mostly concerned with meeting the main NGO actors in Jakarta. I received yesterday the full data from WWF on the RAPPAM exercise for all of the 50 national parks in Indonesia. This is useful for the evaluation since it compares the results of the 2010 survey with that of 2004, and thereby provides a great deal of insight on change in Indonesia on all aspects of the status, threats and management of the habitats and population in the National Park system. Whilst this is only a subset of the PA system (Indonesia has over 650 PAs), it gives a good view of the overall situation.

The plan for the next field trip starting Sunday for 6 days is North Moluku (GEF) and Ambon (non-GEF). As Jeneen has described, all travel in Indonesia is by air and expensive.