Deforestation in Borneo

Borneo, the third largest island in the world, divided between Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei, was once covered by dense tropical and subtropical rainforests.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the forests of Borneo were levelled at a rate unprecedented in human history, burned, logged and cleared, and commonly replaced with agriculture.

As well as Borneo's importance in biodiversity conservation and as a carbon sink, the forests have significance for water security and food sovereignty for local communities of indigenous peoples.

Two forestry researchers[3] of Sepilok Research Centre, Sandakan, Sabah in the early 1980s identified four fast-growing hardwoods and a breakthrough on seed collection and handling of Acacia mangium and Gmelina arborea, fast-growing tropical trees were planted on a huge tract of formerly logged and deforested areas primarily in the northern part of Borneo Island.

During the great fire, hotspots could be seen on satellite images and the haze thus created affected the surrounding countries of Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.

In February 2008, the Malaysian government announced the Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy plan[9] to harvest the virgin hinterlands of northern Borneo.

Further deforestation and destruction of the biodiversity are anticipated in the wake of logging commissions, hydroelectric dams and other mining of minerals and resources.

To combat overpopulation in Java, the Indonesian government started a massive transmigration (transmigrasi) of poor farmers and landless peasants into Borneo in the 1970s and 1980s, to farm the logged areas, albeit with little success as the fertility of the land has been removed with the trees and what soil remains is washed away in tropical downpours.

The goal was to turn one million hectares of "unproductive" and sparsely populated peat swamp forest into rice paddies in an effort to alleviate Indonesia's growing food shortage.

The peat swamp forest in the south of Kalimantan is an unusual ecology home to many unique or rare species such as orangutans and slow-growing but valuable trees.

[11] After drainage, fires ravaged the area, destroying remaining forest and wildlife along with new agriculture, filling the air above Borneo and beyond with dense smoke and haze and releasing enormous quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere.

[14] More recent estimates, comparing legal harvesting against known domestic consumption plus exports, suggest that 88% of logging in the country is illegal in some way.

It is unreasonable to assume that the few highly indebted countries that contain the majority of remaining rain forest should be responsible for single-handedly providing this global public good.

The Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS), founded by Dr Willie Smits, bought up nearly 2,000 ha of deforested degraded land in East Kalimantan that had suffered from mechanical logging, drought and severe fires and was covered in alang-alang grass (Imperata cylindrica).