East Kalimantan

East Kalimantan is the largest of four provinces in Indonesian Borneo. Its tropical forests range from lowland to montane forest to swamp and mangrove forest. Despite being globally recognised for its conservation importance and relatively high level of protection, the forests of East Kalimantan are threatened by commercial logging, palm oil and timber plantations, mining, agricultural development, and forest fires.

Location of East Kalimantan

We are working closely with Dr. Erik Meijaard, The Nature Conservancy, and partners to develop and apply conservation planning theory and methodology to inform future conservation investments in East Kalimantan.

Primary protected forest in East Kalimantan. Photo by Kerrie Wilson

To date, we have completed the following projects:

Planning in production landscapes

We have developed and applied a new planning approach that explicitly accounts for the contribution of a diverse range of land uses to achieving conservation goals. We prioritized investments in alternative conservation strategies across the province and accounted for the relative contribution of land uses ranging from production forest to well-managed protected areas. We employed data on the distribution of mammals (from a collaboration with Luigi Boitani and Carlo Rondinini at The University of Rome) and assigned species-specific conservation targets to achieve equitable protection by accounting for life history characteristics and home range sizes. We found using traditional planning approaches would have overestimated the cost of achieving the conservation targets by an order of magnitude. Our approach revealed not only where to invest, but which strategies to invest in, in order to effectively and efficiently conserve biodiversity in East Kalimantan.

Wilson, K. A., E. Meijaard, S. Drummond, H. S. Grantham, L. Boitani, G. Catullo, L. Christie, R. Dennis, I. Dutton, A. Falcucci, L. Maiorano, H. P. Possingham, C. Rondinini, W. Turner, O. Venter, and M. Watts. 2010. Conserving Biodiversity in Production Landscapes. Ecological Applications. 20:1721-1732. doi:10.1890/09-1051.1

The influence of a threatened species focus on conservation planning

We systematically explored how planning to explicitly preserve threatened mammal species would influence the efficiency and effectiveness of conservation investments in East Kalimantan. We found that the explicit protection of threatened species could deliver cost-efficient outcomes in this situation, while affording adequate protection to over 90% of those species not yet considered endangered, and contributing to the partial protection of the remainder.

Drummond, S. P., K. A. Wilson, E. Meijaard, M. Watts, R. Dennis, L. Christy, and H. P. Possingham. 2010. Influence of a threatened species focus on conservation planning. Conservation Biology 24:441-449  doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01346.x.

Conservation of biodiversity in the context of an emerging carbon market

Initiatives to reduce the release of greenhouse gases are providing increasing incentives for land protection and management. The collateral benefits for biodiversity depends on the extent to which emissions reductions and biodiversity conservation can be achieved in the same places. Indonesia has large tracts of forests that are experiencing heavy exploitation and conversion to agricultural land uses. REDD could provide the incentives to reverse this trend, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and contribute to sustainable development and improved forest management.

Carbon stocks in East Kalimantan

In collaboration with Greenpeace, we are applying decision-support software as a transparent and objective approach to inform land use decisions for REDD and other benefits in Indonesia. Within East Kalimantan, The Nature Conservancy and partners are developing a district-scale REDD program in Berau. The program aims to reduce forest based emissions below predicted baseline levels and catalyze sustainable development through the deployment of a diverse array of strategies.

To guide and measure the effectiveness of these strategies, TNC are currently developing Berau specific data on: forest cover, current land use, carbon stocks and baseline emissions, socio-economic returns from land uses, biological values, and ecosystem services. Using this data we are developing land use plans and prioritizing REDD interventions to identify the key areas and strategies that will maximize sustainable development outcomes.

Key References

Venter, O., E. Meijaard, H. Possingham, R. Dennis, D. Sheil, S. Wich, and K. Wilson. 2009. Carbon payments as a safeguard for threatened tropical mammals. Conservation Letters 2:123-129. doi: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2009.00059

Venter, O, Wilson, K, Meijaard, E. 2008. Strategies and alliances needed to protect forest from palm-oil industry. Nature 451, 16.  doi:10.1038/451016a