The Mawas Project: REDD, Orangutans and People

The Mawas project
The project I´m going to visit during the next days for my publication on best-practice forest management schemes combines in a unique way reduced emissions from deforestation, biodiversity and ecosystem conservation and livelihood concerns for local people.

The peat lands of Central Kalimantan store extremely high amounts of carbon, and release them when drying out, in combination with the powerful climate gas methane. Peat domes regulate the water household of the entire region. Southern Central Kalimantan is flat up to the coast. During the rain season, peat domes take in huge amounts of water like a sponge, thereby avoiding large floods.

About 3000 wild orang-utans live in the area.

There are about 100 000 people living in 58 settlements on the margins of the project area. About 40% of them are indigenous dayaks, and about 60% domestic migrants from other islands of Indonesia, such as Java, explains the Programme Development Manager Juliartia Bramasa Ottag. Those migrants are originally farmers who were hired by former dictator Soeharto for a giant rural development project in the late 1990sb. Soeharto wanted to transform the “unproductive” peat lands into mega rice fields. The project failed, but repercussions are still felt heavily in the area. Long canals were built for the rice cultivation which cut the peat domes into pieces, the water drained and the land dried out. The Mawas project works with international experts to restore such a big peat dome. The domestic migrants were left without the promised economic basis and many resorted to destructive logging, mining and plantation activities. To develop alternative, sustainable, non-destructive but still profitable economic activities with them is one of the big challenges of the Mawas project. Another challenge is the reconciliation and establishment of structures for peaceful co-existence of dayak and migrants. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, violent conflicts between these two groups erupted. For the dayaks, the Mawas management proposes to grant them rights of access to the site to continue their traditional, small-scale economic activities such as selective logging of individual trees, collection of other forest products. Unfortunately, this concept of “right to access for limited, small-scale traditional activities” is not yet recognized under Indonesian law for conservation areas. Another challenge is to ensure that such access rights are not abused by other outside actors who incite the local people to extract more than needed for their own consumption against payment. Small-scale rubber, rattan, rice cultivation, cattle ranching and fish pond maintenance on degraded land are further activities developed on the outskirts of the area. Important is the diversification and economical as well as ecological sustainability. In order to avoid the recurrence of the devastating forest fires of the past, local fire brigades are build and knowledge on fire prevention disseminated. Climate change and destructive land-use practices have made the land much more prone to large-scale fires, than it was the case in the past.

Conflicting priorities for land-use
A major problem in Central Kalimantan is the lack of coherent spatial planning. For years now, the district, provincial and national administrations pursue contradictory plans. The district level often favours more palm oil plantations (the revenues from concessions going to them), the provincial level wants to enhance settlements and agriculture and the national level advocates logging (revenues going to them) and conservation. On the ground, regulation is anyways often pure theory, with many illegal and unlicensed activities going on.

Financing Mawas by offsetting?
Apart from the governmental endorsement of the Mawas management plan, financing is a major challenge. Development cooperation funds only finance the development and implementation of a project, but do not provide long-term financial flows. Private and public investors are interested in off-setting and greenwashing their own destructive activities. Shell wants to offset its carbon footprint, the government of Australia as well in order to avoid domestic emission reductions and the roundtable on sustainable palm oil is looking for biodiversity compensation areas for its plantations. More altruistic donors are difficult to find.