Business Times 4 Jan 08
CHEAH UI-HOON visits Sabah's Danum Valley, where reforestation has turned thousands of hectares of logged forest into lush greenery, providing shelter to a rich variety of wildlife - and perhaps the answer to climate change
THIS might look like any other nursery with its neat rows of leafy plants in polybags placed under thick, black netting so the plants can bask in the soft sunshine. Nestled in a vast rainforest reserve in Danum Valley, Sabah, this is not your ordinary greenhouse, however. Individuals would not head there and ask to buy a couple of Hopea Nervosas or Hopea SPPs - not unless they want a 20-metre tropical hardwood tree in their garden.
But one day, countries or companies might. Not in their respective gardens, but in tropical rainforests all over Asia. The picture you see is in fact a snapshot of the Sabah Biodiversity Experiment, one of the world's earliest and biggest reforestation projects started 15 years ago.
Through this project - which is a joint scheme with the Dutch Electricity Board to offset the greenhouse gases produced in the Netherlands - rainforest seedlings have been planted in about 11,000 hectares of logged forest since 1992. Currently, the nursery has 200,000 seedlings waiting to be planted but it could have up to a million seedlings to fill thousands of hectares of degraded forest, when funds permit.
And why it concerns us - city dwellers - is because this could well be the answer to climate change: Reforestation.
'Young, growing trees in a forest absorb a lot of carbon. And this project has shown that degraded forests can and should be restored,' explains Glen Reynolds, senior scientist and programme manager of the Petra Foundation and the Royal Society's South East Asia Rainforest Research Programme (SEARRP) in Danum Valley.
Just as the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali was wrapping up in December, a group of journalists from Malaysia and Singapore descended upon Danum Valley and the research centre there which has been a base for scientists from all over the world since 1985.
The trip was hosted by The Petra Group, a Malaysian company which recently gave a grant of £pounds;1 million (S$2.9 million) to the Royal Society's SEARRP to be disbursed over an eight-year period. The agreement will see the Petra Foundation and the Green Rubber Global company take over as the main sponsors of SEARRP from 2008.
In case the rhetorical twists and turns of the recent Bali Climate Change conference were difficult to grasp, here's one buzzword you want to remember - REDD, or Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation.
Deforestation was the hot topic, according to environmentalists, because 20 per cent of carbon emissions are from deforestation, which is more than from the entire transport sector. Debate on a pay-and-preserve plan, where countries like Malaysia and Indonesia are paid to keep their forest reserves instead of converting them into other land use, dominated the news as there is as yet no financial incentive for countries to preserve their virgin forests.
'Carbon market'
Scientists like Dr Reynolds and Waidi Sinun, head of the research and development department of the Sabah Foundation which manages Danum Valley, see the day coming when there is a 'carbon market' for forests, so that they will hold a commercial value by just being what they are.
'There needs to be a shift away from thinking of the forest as a source of timber to valuing it for its services - as a bio-diversity bank and a carbon offset area, amongst other things,' says Dr Reynolds. As he said in a BBC interview, a rainforest now is worth more dead than alive, 'so there's got to be a viable financial incentive that will stand up to timber and palm oil industries'.
'It's about sustainable forest management,' says Dr Sinun, who himself is a product of Sabah's forests. The logging industry there, started in the 1960s, paid for his education.
Those who want to find out about reforestation can take a lesson from the Sabah Biodiversity Experiment, currently the only reforestation project around on such a large scale, points out Dr Reynolds. 'People have been talking about reforestation, but here, the Sabah Foundation is actually doing it.'
Danum Valley is one of the world's top three rainforest research centres, the others being in Costa Rica and Panama. Its valued status in science is little known or acknowledged in this part of the world, however, unless you're a tropical ecologist.
Just to get an idea of the richness of the rainforest in Sabah's one-million-hectare Danum Valley forest reserve: A hectare of forest there contains about 300 species of trees. A hectare in the United Kingdom (which has only 10 per cent of its forest left) has just 30 tree species.
With the new focus on and recognition of forests and the role they play in climate change, the lessons learnt in the Sabah Biodiversity Experiment can apply to degraded forests elsewhere, says Dr Sinun. 'We've learnt how to conduct Reduced Impact Logging, which damages the forest less than conventional logging, and also learnt that forests can be rehabilitated if not damaged repeatedly.'
The evidence is in the rich wildlife and the towering trees you see in Danum Valley, which, incidentally, includes formerly logged forest. The one-million-hectare valley was given to the Sabah Foundation, an educational trust, by the Sabah government. Logging provided the finances to fund the Foundation's activities, which include conservation and environment protection.
Logging in Danum was to be phased out at the end of last year. No wonder then, the frenzied pace of logging trucks going to and fro from the forest to town when journalists visited. In the two hour-plus drive from Lahad Datu town to the Danum Valley Field Centre, we must have passed more than 10 logging trucks lumbering to town, each of them laden with thick, round, freshly-cut tree trunks.
Despite that, the forest we passed through was green and lush with a fair number of 20-metre and 30-metre trees on the horizon. 'I see wild elephants on the trail every day,' declares Victor Brant, who works for a heli-logging company. The jovial foreman had pitched in to help get our bus out of a muddy spot - at a part where the dirt road had sagged badly, heavily indented by the weight of logging trucks and kept mushy by the rainy weather. It took us about an hour to get out of that spot, where we had caused a minor traffic blockage - one laden logging truck and three four-wheel drives ahead of us, and up to five empty logging trucks behind waiting to go into the valley for their wooden cargo.
Animal sightings
We thought Mr Brant was bragging at first, even though we'd seen elephant dung by the roadside earlier on. But true enough, barely half an hour after we resumed our journey, we saw a group of four or five small elephants - which looked like the Borneo pygmy elephants - just by the logging road, retreating quickly and silently back into the forest when we stopped and fumbled with our cameras.
At the Borneo Rainforest Lodge, located even deeper in Danum Valley, the wild-animal sightings noted by the eco-lodge's guests are impressive: wet tarsier, rhinoceros hornbill, red leaf monkey, pygmy elephant ('a herd of 20', a guest jotted in the visitor's book), orang utan, gibbon, slow loris, sambar deer, giant tree squirrel - just on daily jungle trail walks. Although a clouded leopard would be a bonus to spot, it's already like Jurassic Park minus the dinosaurs.
And this is logged - not virgin - forest as far as the eye can see, says Dr Reynolds, gesturing from the viewing deck of Danum Valley Field Centre's observation tower which is next to a Malaysian government-funded global atmosphere watch station, the only one of two in the Asia-Pacific region.
With the greenery all around, can he tell the difference between degraded and restored forest? 'In a degraded forest, you'd see a lot more creepers growing over the trees, for example,' he explains.
It turns out that during replanting, which is laborious work, Danum Valley's research assistants do a fair bit of clearing of creepers as well, when they mark out an area to replant - to make sure the seedlings grow unhindered. They also have to go back regularly to make sure there is no competing vegetation.
The reforestation carried out so far is proof that a logged forest can be restored, rather than justify converting it into oil palm plantations. 'What we're trying to do here is to restore the rainforest, to get it back as a primary rainforest which it started off as,' says Dr Reynolds. 'If converted into plantation, then the impact on biodiversity is really severe. You'd lose 90 to 95 per cent of it.'
With the limited funding the project has, it's running under-capacity for now. 'But the technology and methods we've developed here can easily be replicated in other parts of Malaysia and South-east Asia,' says Dr Sinun.
Now it's just a matter of waiting for the world's politicians to catch up, and come up with a viable carbon market. 'For now, this is a voluntary market, as the carbon this project is absorbing isn't tradeable under the Kyoto Protocol which favours reforestation of empty land, not existing forest,' says Dr Reynolds. 'Then it becomes interesting financially - potentially anyway. For now, only companies which want to be seen as carbon-neutral are funding this project.'
Meanwhile, some 30 species of indigenous rainforest tree seedlings are waiting to shoot up in the under-capacity-run nursery. Hopea Nervosa and SPP, known locally as Jangkang and Selangan, are quite aptly named. They could well be the hope of the planet in years to come.
