Bird conservation in Sumatra: Project Harapan

RSPB in Sumatra: high hopes
The Telegraph 24 Oct 08;

For all their good intentions, conservation projects in the world's endangered habitats often lose their way, soaking up time, money and effort, only to founder. Richard Grant went to Sumatra, where the RSPB's programme to save the island's over-logged rainforest might buck the trend. Photographs by Clare Kendall

I was going to a big new forest conservation project in Sumatra called Harapan, the Indonesian word for hope. I wanted to hope. I missed being hopeful. But over the years I had visited similar-sounding projects in Mexico, Haiti, Spain, Siberia and parts of Africa, and they had drained the hope right out of me.

They were all going to save endangered forests and wildlife, and empower the local communities to develop alternative sustainable livelihoods that would enhance biodiversity - you have to tick all these jargon boxes to get funding out of the UN, the EU or anyone else these days - and the sad, bald truth of the matter was that none of these projects was working.

The things they were trying to save were being destroyed, and the community development schemes had an amazing knack for absorbing time, money and effort and then falling apart. Why would the Harapan Rainforest Initiative be any different?

It was the brainchild of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), an organisation headquartered in the Bedfordshire commuter belt and perhaps best known for its work in the Suffolk marshes and a certain style of rainproof outerwear favoured by its typical members. Meeting some of its senior executives in London, I learnt that the RSPB is, in fact, a serious player in the big leagues of global conservation. It was founded on an international campaign against bird feathers in ladies' hats in the 1930s, and now it has bird habitat conservation schemes up and running in 35 countries. They seemed like intelligent, determined, efficient people, and deeply committed to their big flagship project in Sumatra, but it was hard to see how or why the RSPB would succeed when so many big international conservation groups had failed to stop or even slow down the rampaging destruction of Indonesia's rainforests.

'The difference now is timing,' said Dr Dieter Hoffman, the head of global programmes. 'Five years ago this project would not have succeeded. But now it is staring Indonesia in the face how little rainforest is left, and the government is getting sensitive about its bad international image on this issue. Plus we have all this talk about carbon credits at the UN, at climate change conferences, in the media.'

The basic idea of carbon credits is for countries such as Britain to pay countries such as Indonesia and Brazil not to cut down their rainforests, because tropical deforestation is such a major contributor to global warming. Hoffman was worried that carbon credits might give us more licence to pollute, and that the money would end up in the pockets of the ruling elite, but he thought that a forest carbon market was emerging and inevitable, and an important reason why the Indonesian government had given Harapan the go-ahead.

I left that meeting feeling encouraged, but also aware that conservation organisations are in the business of selling a message, and the message has to be a careful balance of alarmism and optimism. There is always a dire emergency and a win-win solution that just needs to be funded and implemented. All too often, in my experience, the emergencies were real enough but the solutions were naive, doctrinaire and ineffective. They had a fatal tendency to underestimate the ruthlessness of the economic forces they were up against, the intransigence of local cultures and, above all, the pervasiveness of corruption in the developing world.

We landed at Pelambang airport in south-east Sumatra, loaded the vehicles with supplies and drove up through the middle of the island - hour after hour of oil palm and pulp wood plantations, raw frontier settlements, greasy heat, honking horns, crazy drivers. I was staggered by the scale of what had happened here. This was all lowland tropical rainforest, the richest ecosystem on earth. It used to cover most of Sumatra, an island twice the size of Britain, and contained more species than the Amazon. The logging began in earnest in the 1980s and now the forest is nearly gone. We had bird identification books, binoculars and a sharp-eyed team from the RSPB, and we drove all day and most of the next without seeing a single bird.

From an economic development perspective, we were looking at a success story. People were pouring into this newly opened frontier from other, more crowded parts of Indonesia; Sumatra's population had doubled in 30 years. They were finding work in the plantations or on logging crews, and able to afford monthly payments on motorbikes, cars, mobile phones. They were buying televisions and satellite dishes for their hastily assembled shacks, and running them off car batteries until the electricity arrived. Meanwhile the bosses were getting rich, buying mansions in Jakarta and Sydney, and the rest of us were getting well supplied with wood products and palm oil - a vital ingredient in many of our cosmetics, soaps, shampoos, processed foods, and now an EU-subsidised biofuel.

Environmentally, it was a holocaust. According to Tony Whitten, an ecologist with the World Bank and an expert on Sumatra, clearing 10,000 hectares of this lowland rainforest - enough for one small corporate oil palm plantation - means the death of 30,000 squirrels, 5,000 monkeys, 1,500 hornbills, 900 siamang (a large ape), 600 gibbons, 20 tigers, 10 elephants, and of course everything else that lives there, possibly including rare clouded leopards, sun bears, the Sumatran rhinoceros and the world's biggest and tallest flowering plants.

Here in Jambi province in central Sumatra, one million hectares have been cleared in the past 10 years, so multiply that death toll by 100 and then consider that Jambi is one of seven provinces in Sumatra where the forest is disappearing at a similar rate, and Sumatra is just one island in Indonesia, which has now overtaken Brazil to become the world's leading destroyer of tropical rainforest and the third biggest producer of greenhouse gases after China and the US.

There is still a vague idea wafting around in our culture that the rainforest is last decade's issue, and we are on to the bigger, more pressing matter of climate change, but the two things are inseparable. In 1997 fires burning in the logged-over rainforests of Indonesia supplied a third of the planet's carbon emissions for that year. Last year, deforestation in Indonesia and Brazil contributed more to global warming than the whole of human transportation - all our planes, trains, ships and automobiles put together.

It works like this: tropical forests absorb an enormous amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and when you cut them down, you lose that 'carbon sink' effect and also release most of the carbon they have been storing over the millennia. It evaporates from the exposed, decaying forest floor. It goes up in smoke when people burn off the logging remnants to clear the ground for agriculture; the annual dry-season smoke plumes rising off the Amazon and Indonesia are now visible from space. When it comes to global warming, according to Sir Nicholas Stern and other climate change experts, our first priority should be to save the remaining rainforests. But how? This is the vital question, and the reason why Sir Nicholas himself flew to Sumatra and travelled the long bumpy road to Harapan.

On the afternoon of the second day, we reached a white sign bearing the logos of the RSPB, its global arm Birdlife International, and its local partner Burung Indonesia. We turned on to a smaller road. On one side of it was the symmetrical monoculture of a big oil palm plantation, managed recently by the Commonwealth Development Corporation and the Cargill group. On the other side was a high wall of rainforest alive and screeching with monkeys and birds. A troop of long-tailed macaques swung past. Electric-blue kingfishers and hornbills flew overhead. A small deer startled and bolted, leaving heart-shaped tracks in the mud.

Harapan is an old logging concession the size of Greater London and far from pristine. It is damaged, degraded and mostly second-growth forest. Its big trees and high canopy are gone, but it still has its seeds and soil and remnant populations of tigers, elephants, clouded leopards, sun bears and more than 270 species of bird, which is why the RSPB zeroed in on it. After a long campaign of political lobbying and legal jousting, the RSPB and its partner organisations eventually succeeded in persuading the Indonesian government to change its forestry laws, so it could buy a 100-year lease on the logging concession and manage it instead for conservation and restoration. The plan is to let the forest grow back to its former glory, establish sustainable development projects with the local people, and then use Harapan as a model for more rainforest restoration projects with an eye towards carbon credits and ecotourism. You can't fault the RSPB for lack of ambition. Harapan is already the biggest project of this kind in the world.

We pulled up to the headquarters, a quadrangle of white wooden buildings put up by the logging company and now starting to sag and peel. Agile gibbons whooped in the trees, a big black hornbill flapped across the sky and out strode the executive director, Sean Marron, a middle-aged Englishman looking impossibly crisp in the wilting heat. I was soon in front of his wall charts, having an intense caffeinated discussion about the successes so far and the challenges ahead. 'When we arrived on site, less than a year ago, we found 684 chainsaws, 13 mobile sawmills, 67 timber trucks and hundreds of illegal loggers,' he said. 'We started putting patrols in the field, and pressure on the local police, and in the last few months we have seen a dramatic reduction. It is an occasional incident now. We do have an issue with illegal squatters. At its worst, there were several hundred families living inside our boundaries and their numbers were expanding. Now it's down to the low hundreds. Originally I was very pessimistic about this issue, but it's surprising how reasonable people can be when you explain the situation to them. We've also got about 50 families of an indigenous group, the Batin Sembilan, and as far as possible we're hiring them and integrating them into the project.'

I was interested to hear that Marron, his head of administration Muhammed Zubairin, forest conservation manager Ian Rowland and several other staff members all used to work at the big oil palm plantation over the road. They were headhunted by the RSPB because they spoke the language, knew the area and knew how to get things done in Sumatra.

It seemed like a good hiring decision and I was also impressed with their choice of patrol leader. Desnat, a burly 39-year-old with prison tattoos, had an unmistakable air of authority and a new-found but fierce commitment to the cause. He seemed like a very useful man to have on your side when confronting illegal loggers and squatters and telling them they had to leave.

Sitting pillion on a motorbike, I spent a day with three uniformed forest rangers, the Telegraph photographer and a RSPB interpreter. Harapan is so big and the roads are so bad - this is deliberate, to make them impassable to logging trucks - that we saw only a small portion in nine hours. Some areas had been clear-felled and were now growing back in dense lush thickets, and it was here, where the worst destruction had occurred, that most of the tigers were now living. Tapirs and deer were attracted to the tender young shoots and leaves and the tigers had followed them and found good hunting cover in the thickets. The tiger population was estimated at between 13 and 20 and increasing.

The elephants were way off in the south-west and hadn't been studied much, because the main focus and funding was for birds. We encountered ornithologists from Britain and Indonesia and they had just upped the Harapan species count to 286, including nine species of hornbill, the critically endangered storm's stork, the black-thighed falconette, the scaly crowned babbler, and my personal favourite, the fluffy-backed tit babbler.

It was a difficult place to photograph. The birds were very wary, the land was flat, the giant trees were gone, there were no majestic vistas. When you got into the rainforest on foot, it was tangled and gloomy. Vines grabbed at your ankles, thorns tore at your flesh. Saturated with sweat, you slapped at malarial mosquitoes and kept your eyes peeled for venomous snakes. In a small clearing we came across an old hunters' camp with abandoned wire snares. They were getting meat for their families, the rangers said, not tiger parts for the Chinese black market. Poaching had never been much of a problem here. Logging was everything, first legal, then illegal, and everyone had assumed that palm oil would follow.

The next day we went to the north-east part of Harapan where two groups of people were living in separate areas: immigrants and locals. The immigrants were the type of chancers who show up on every frontier, chasing the boom. They had satellite dishes, vehicles and small amounts of capital, and they wanted to log trees and plant smallholdings of oil palm. Their numbers were declining because it was easier to make a living this way in other places. The locals were mostly Batin Sembilan, who had grown up here when it was deep, pristine forest and lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle. Now they were in and around a village built by the logging company. It had a small wooden mosque, a school and a scattering of worker housing, all starting to decay.

We met a man named Lo. He was short, stocky and quietly spoken, 44 years old, he thought. He lived in one of the houses with his wife and two small children. When the logging company came, he got a job as a security guard. When they left, he went back to fishing and planting rice and cassava. Now more outsiders had appeared and hired him as a forest patrol ranger. He had a uniform, a cap and wellington boots and his job was to patrol the forest with other men, and report back on the birds, animals and any loggers, hunters, poachers or new settlers they came across. It was a good job, he said, and he was very happy to have it.

Harapan has hired as many forest rangers out of this and another local village as it can possibly justify, and it's a shame they can't hire more. The rest of the men - nearly all ex-loggers - were now supporting themselves by fishing, gathering a saleable resin from the forest, and picking up pieces of scrap metal. Harapan's community development coordinator, Suhirman Tjandra, a sweet, earnest, slightly fragile young man, had initiated a number of projects intended to promote new sustainable livelihoods, but none of them had quite taken off.

The last outsiders here, the logging company, had paid people to work. Tjandra got them to build a fish pond and a chicken coop, and then didn't pay them. 'I have to explain to them over and over,' he said. 'We are your partner, your friend. These fish will be your fish. These will be your chickens. If you look after them, you will always have food to eat. But this is very hard for them to understand. They have never planned for the future like this.'

He was trying to persuade the women to gather rattan from the forest and weave it into mats, baskets and fire-beaters. He would give them money and then try to find a market for these products. 'We are promoting empowerment,' he said. His English wasn't good but he knew the jargon of his trade. 'We are listening and facilitating. These are pilot projects, not big success yet, but little by little, yes, we must be patient.'

This conjured a flood of memories. The women's handicraft co-operative whose products ended up in the offices of the NGO that had funded it. The pilot farming projects destroyed by the local goats. The organic rainforest honey marketing scheme that was destroyed by its own success: people loved the honey but there weren't enough bees to sustain it.

Back at HQ with Sean Marron, I got into a discussion about the various models of environmental conservation. What works, what doesn't and why? One of the most effective models I had seen was private ownership by eco-conscious billionaires such as Ted Turner, who had bought up two million acres in the American West, reintroduced the buffalo, restored ecosystems and turned his lands into vast nature reserves. Doug Tompkins, the founder of North Face, had done the same thing on a smaller scale in Chile, and in Mexico some billionaires are now hiring ecologists and competing with each other to have rare animals such as jaguars, wolves and ocelots on their estates - not for hunting but for bragging rights.

Another model is national parks and here the success story is Costa Rica. In return for getting its international debts absolved, it agreed to conserve large areas of its rainforests as national parks, and they are now well-funded, well-managed and a major source of tourism revenue. In other parts of the world national parks are overrun with poachers, loggers, livestock grazers and settlers. The RSPB's first idea was to push the Indonesian government to create a national park at Harapan, but the government wasn't interested and its national parks are in a woeful condition - underfunded, understaffed and being ransacked by illegal loggers in collusion with corrupt police.

Then there is grass-roots community-based conservation, the current industry standard model. It evolved in response to stinging criticism from the academic left, who accused conservationists of being neo-colonialists, consorting with repressive regimes to form national parks, imposing their ideas and ignoring the needs of poor, hungry people, doing nothing to help economic development, and so on. So now a lot of time and money was spent listening to local communities and trying to square their needs with the needs of wildlife and conservation. Rather than impose their ideas, the conservationists would try to gently persuade and influence, by setting up workshops, pilot projects and distributing small amounts of patronage. Meanwhile, as I had seen time and again, loggers and poachers were marching straight past them and taking what they wanted, protected by a network of corruption.

The Harapan Rainforest Initiative uses a lot of the language and ideas of community-based conservation but the crucial difference, as Marron was quick to point out, is that they have management control of the land for the next 100 years. They are not here as persuaders, as missionaries for a foreign belief system. They have the power of ownership and they lobbied skilfully and persistently to get it, and in the process they acquired some friends and leverage in high places.

I asked him about his biggest worry for the project. I put the same question to the biologists, ornithologists and Ian Rowland, the forestry manager. They all gave the same answer: fire. The climate was drying out, lightning storms were frequent, people were setting fires all over the island to clear the ground for planting, and it seemed like every Sumatran male, including the Harapan forest rangers, smoked almost continually and were not in the habit of carefully extinguishing their cigarette butts. In the past year, they had extinguished 27 fires in Harapan, mostly by dispatching men with rattan fire-beaters. Now they had ordered water tanks, pumps, chemical flame retardants, satellite-imaging software that could identify the first outbreaks of forest fire. Fire engines would require roads that were also passable to logging trucks, so they were looking instead at fire-extinguishing units that could be mounted on motorbikes.

Leaving Harapan, I had real hope that it could work, and also the worries, concerns and anxieties that come along with hope. What a cruel irony it would be if it were destroyed not by men with chainsaws but by an elemental force of nature. It had been a long time since I had given any money to conservationists, and now I was wondering if I could earmark a donation for one of those bike-mounted fire extinguishers.