Investigators will summon officials from two companies suspected of burning a large swath of the Tripa forest to make way for palm oil plantations, said Sudaryono, the head of law enforcement at the Environment Ministry.

“Our investigators found that there have been fires in areas controlled by SPS2 and KA,” he said, referring to palm oil companies Surya Panen Subur 2 and Kallista Alam.

A coalition of local and international conservation groups warned in March that orangutans in the Tripa forest could disappear by the end of this year unless action was taken to stop fires and land clearing there.

The coalition said an estimated 100 orangutans had died in the area in recent years as a result of land clearing, with only 200 remaining.

The government’s task force for the UN’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) program said there were indications that plantation companies cleared more than 1,600 hectares of peatland areas even before they obtained concession permits.

“Law enforcers concluded that there have been legal violations,” task force chief Kuntoro Mangkusubroto said.

Under Indonesia’s environmental law, forest clearing using fires is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to 10 billion rupiah ($1 million).

Kallista Alam has denied wrongdoing and blamed local farmers for the fires.

In May 2011, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono signed a decree committing Indonesia to a two-year moratorium on new clearing permits for an area of around 60 million hectares of virgin forest and carbon-rich peatland.

The move was part of the country’s commitment to the REDD program, which aims to reduce climate change from greenhouse gasses.

But in August, the then-governor of Aceh province, Irwandi Yusuf, signed a permit to allow Kallista Alam to operate in Tripa.

The environmental coalition is awaiting a verdict on an appeal seeking the revocation of the permit.

Tripa was included in the moratorium map in April 2011, but it disappeared from a revised version in November, the local environmental group Walhi said.

Greenpeace said in a report released this month that the moratorium had done little to protect forests, with almost 50 percent of the country’s primary forests and peatland without any protection.

The destruction of peatlands releases large amounts of carbon dioxide that contributes to climate change.

Indonesia is among the largest producers of greenhouse gasses, largely owing to the rapid destruction of its forests. It aims to reduce the emissions by at least 26 percent by 2020.

This article was written by Ahmad Pathoni and appeared in the Jakarta Globe.  OC edit by Tom.

The acting head of Nagan Raya Regency — the location of Tripa peat swamp — on Thursday demanded a stop to a controversial palm oil development project that conservationists say threatens a population of endangered orangutans, reports Serambi Indonesia.

Nagan Raya butapi H Azwir told the Aceh-based newspaper that PT Kalista Alam should immediately cease activities in the contested part of Tripa’s peat forest, in Aceh Province on the island of Sumatra. He said that research into the palm oil company’s concession indicated that PT Kalista Alam lacked permission to convert the forest into a plantation.

“We asked the company to immediately stop the activity in the area. Their actions are wrong, because there is no consent,” Azwir is quoted as saying.

Azwir added that PT Kalista Alam may be required to restore the area that area that it damaged.

But Azwir has limited power is stop PT Kalista Alam’s activities according to Elfian Effendi, head of Greenomics-Indonesia.

“The acting regent has the power to ask the company to stop the operation based on certain considerations, especially legal aspects,” Effendi told mongabay.com. “However, the acting regent has no power to revoke the permit because the PT Kalista Alam’s permit was issued by the Aceh Governor.”

Irwandi Yusuf, the governor who issued the permit, has since been voted out of office. Irwandi, who has been championed as a leader in efforts to save Indonesia’s forests, said earlier this year that he granted the license to highlight lack of financial support for forest conservation. Millions of dollars promised by the international community to help protect Aceh’s rainforests have been slow to materialize.

Demands for action in the Tripa case have heated up in recent months after a campaign by a coalition of environmental groups. Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, the chairman of Indonesia’s REDD+ Taskforce recently demanded a full investigation into PT Kalista Alam’s concession. Kuntoro has since indicated that the contested land could be made off-limits to development under the next iteration of the Indicative Map that is the basis for Indonesia’s two-year moratorium on new concessions in peatlands an primary forest areas.

Effendi said that Azwir’s call could boost the effort to reestablish the Tripa concession as land protected under the moratorium.

This aticle appeared on Mongabay.com at http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0511-tripa-nagan-raya.html#ixzz1uu5k55qD.  Image courtesy of Tim Koalisi Penyelematan Rawa Tripa, a coalition of community groups.

Rehabilitation centers caring for more than 1,000 orangutans in Kalimantan are unable to comply with a presidential decree to release the animals back into the wild due to a shortage of suitable land, officials say.

The goal of the decree, passed in 2007, was to prevent the endangered orangutans from going extinct.

“The government’s policy to release orangutans from rehabilitation centers to the wilderness could not be carried out,” Jamartin Sihite, chief executive of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, said on Tuesday. “There isn’t enough available land that’s suitable and free from disruption.”

The foundation wants to release 50 orangutans this year in Central and East Kalimantan, and in order to do so, it had to obtain land concession rights from the Forestry Ministry. It paid Rp 13 billion ($1.4 million) for the rights to 86,450 hectares of land for the next 60 years, Jamartin said.

He said that some of the available land is not suitable for the orangutans, which can only live in areas less than 900 meters above sea level. There can only be one orangutan per 10 square kilometers, and they must have adequate access to food supplies.

“We’ve made a proposal in Central Kalimantan but it hasn’t been approved by the local administration,” Jamartin said. “We’ve obtained [approval] in East Kalimantan but it [the land] was insufficient.”

In Central Kalimantan, he said, the orangutans will be released into the Betikap conservation forest. In East Kalimantan, they will be released into the forests of Kehje Sewen, currently managed by Restorasi Habitat Orangutan Indonesia.

He added that the foundation must also consider the lifestyle practices of local communities, which have slaughtered orangutans in the past.

Oil palm plantations, coal mining companies and industrial forest plantations in the region are also a threat as they destroy much of the orangutans’ forest habitat.

Jamartin said separate land plots must be provided to protect wild orangutans because they cannot live in the same space as rehabilitated orangutans, who are unable to protect themselves when they are released into the wild. Experts say there are 50,000 to 60,000 orangutans left in the wild. Eighty percent of them are in Indonesia and the rest are in Malaysia.

This article is courtesy of The Jakarta Globe and was written by Tunggadewa Mattangkilang.

The Orangutan Conservancy is pleased to announce the dates and location for our fourth veterinary workshop. This summer’s event will be held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from July 9-13, 2012. During the workshop we will be posting daily updates, and next month we’ll list this year’s full agenda. It costs the Orangutan Conservancy well over $20,000 each year to stage and host the annual event.  If you would like to help OC with this year’s event please visit our make a donation page.

Collectively, the veterinarians and healthcare staff at rehabilitation centers in Borneo and Sumatra care for the largest captive population of orangutans in the world. Yet they face nearly impossible odds, and often find themselves short of medicine, equipment, money, space, support staff and time.

But those same dedicated men and women do not lack for skill. Or commitment. And that is why the Orangutan Conservancy created the Orangutan Conservancy (OC/OVAG) Veterinary Workshop, an annual seminar that gathers together the veterinary teams that work at the frontlines of the orangutan conservation crisis, and gave them a rare opportunity to hone skills, discuss issues and ideas, and renew friendships that could some day mean the difference between life and death for endangered apes.

The video above is a highlight reel from the 2011 OC/OVAG Veterinary Workshop. To learn more about the workshops visit http://www.orangutan.com/projects/oc-veterinary-workshop/.

Which country is the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after the United States and China?

The answer, at least in some recent years, has been Indonesia. That’s surprising. It’s not the world’s third-largest economy. It’s not an industrial powerhouse. But Indonesia has been clearing its vast rain forests and burning through its peatlands of late, releasing huge stores of carbon into the air. One of the big culprits here has been the country’s fast-growing production of palm oil, an edible vegetable oil that’s increasingly being harvested to make biodiesel fuel for cars and trucks in Europe and elsewhere.

This isn’t just a bit of environmental trivia. Currently, there’s a fierce battle in the United States over whether the Environmental Protection Agency should allow more diesel made from palm oil to be used by U.S. refineries. Agribusiness groups are lobbying for its use. Environmentalists are trying to block it — with some saying this could be the EPA’s most important climate-change decision of the year.

Here’s the backstory: In 2007, Congress expanded a requirement for U.S. refineries to blend a certain amount of “renewable fuel” in with their gasoline. Ethanol or biofuels could count. They just had to be 20 percent cleaner than traditional fossil fuels. And, in January, the EPA released a preliminary analysis suggesting that biodiesel and renewable diesel made from palm oil didn’t quite make the cut, thanks in part to the deforestation effect. (Over the course of their lifecycle, the EPA found, palm-oil fuels emitted between 11 percent to 17 percent fewer greenhouse gases than regular gasoline.)

But the EPA hasn’t fully made up its mind yet. The agency is gathering comments on its analysis until Friday, April 27. And industry groups from Indonesia, Malaysia, and the United States have sharply criticized the agency’s analysis, with the American Palm Oil Council claiming that the EPA’s conclusion was “based on faulty data and erroneous assumptions.”

What do they mean? Robert Shapiro, a former Clinton administration economist who now does analysis for business groups, argued in his comment that it’s “highly speculative” to calculate how, exactly, the production of biofuels will drive deforestation. Efforts to figure out how biofuels indirectly affect land use — by, say, displacing cooking-oil production elsewhere — are still a relatively new area of science. If you remove this from the analysis, Shapiro argued, then palm-oil fuels look considerably cleaner and easily qualify as a renewable fuel. What’s more, he noted, palm-oil producers will likely increase their yields on existing lands in the future, which means they’ll cut down fewer forests.

Palm-oil skeptics aren’t buying it. In a conference call with reporters on Thursday, Jeremy Martin, a biofuels expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, argued that the EPA’s analysis actually understimates the destructive impact of palm-oil production in Indonesia and Malaysia. His group’s comments to the EPA can be found here.

For one thing, Martin explained, much of the forest area that’s being cleared for palm oil is peatland, whose soils store considerable amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The EPA assumed that only around 9 to 13 percent of future palm-oil production would occur on peatland, whereas a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found the number was already above 50 percent. And, Martin said, the EPA was too optimistic about the ability of countries like Indonesia to enforce their forestry laws.

When all of these factors are taken into account, said Martin, “the emissions of palm oil based biofuels substantially exceed the emissions from conventional petroleum diesel.”

There’s a lot at stake in getting this right. Palm oil is a potentially lucrative industry for developing countries like Indonesia and Malaysia. But Indonesia’s peatlands also contain an enormous amount of carbon-dioxide. (To get a sense for the scale here, one particularly large peatland fire in Kalimantan in 1997 released more total greenhouse-gas emissions than the entire United States over that period.) And, according to the PNAS study, peatland emissions from palm-oil production are expected to surge in the years ahead. Palm-oil producers are also razing habitats for elephants, tigers, rhinos, and orangutans on various islands in Southeast Asia.

Some green activists have placed their hopes in sustainable palm-oil production to navigate these concerns — after all, poorer communities in Southeast Asia aren’t just going to agree to an outright ban. But, increasingly, attention has shifted toward wealthy countries that are artificially inflating palm-oil production with government mandates on biofuels.

The EPA decision will help determine whether the United States becomes a major buyer. But, for now, the biggest market for palm-oil based fuels is still the European Union, which has a law requiring 10 percent of all transportation fuel to come from renewable sources by 2020. The problem with this rule, said Chris Malins of the International Council on Clean Transportation, is that the European Union never considered the indirect deforestation effects from biofuels. The science on this only really emerged in 2008 or so, after the E.U. law was largely crafted.

“What Europe did was basically consistent with the best life-cycle emissions analyses of the past,” said Malins. “But,” he added, “Europe recognizes that there’s an issue here, and there’s an ongoing process to change that.”

Which means that the EPA’s decision here in the United States could very well influence how governments around the world think about palm oil. In a quiet year for climate policy, that could stand out as a major move.

This article was written by Brad Plumer and appeared on and is courtesy of WONKBLOG.  Photo courtesy of reuters.Title edit by Tom.

In light of the 42nd anniversary of Earth Day, celebrated this year on April 22, the government and citizens of Indonesia are again reminded of the huge challenges they face in halting or reversing the declining state of their natural forests, including those on Sumatra.

Sumatra is a rare island in that it harbors four endangered and unique mammals, namely the Sumatran orangutan, the Sumatran elephant, the Sumatran rhino and the Sumatran tiger.

Its lowland forests are recognized as part of the Global 200 Ecoregions — nature regions, landscapes or seascapes that are exceptionally important and symbolic for the survival of rich biodiversity features.

In 2004, 2.5 million hectares of Sumatra’s rainforests were included on the World Heritage List of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for their rich and unique biodiversity.

According to UNESCO, the tropical rainforest heritage of Sumatra, comprising Gunung Leuser, Kerinci Seblat and Bukit Barisan Selatan national parks, is home to an estimated 10,000 plant species, more than 200 mammal species and some 580 bird species.

However, the forests on this island have come under the constant threat of destructive and illegal logging activities, expansion of agriculture and pulp plantations, as well as infrastructure development.

Then environment minister Gusti Mohammad Hatta stated in 2010 that Sumatra had experienced tremendous pressures resulting from natural resource exploitation. He further argued that natural forests had decreased, leaving only 29 percent of forest cover on the island.

A 2010 technical report submitted to the National Forestry Council and the National Development Planning Agency, which provided scientific analysis of the state of Sumatra’s natural forests, found a steep decline in forest area from 25.3 million hectares (58 percent of land cover) in 1985 to 12.8 million hectares in 2008/2009 (29 percent), which equals an annual loss of 0.54 million hectares (approximately eight times that of Jakarta’s territory).

In 2011, UNESCO placed the tropical rainforest heritage of Sumatra on the list of those world heritage sites in danger. The organization viewed that the forests had been frequently under pressure from poaching, illegal logging, agricultural encroachment and road development.

To respond to these challenges, plans and initiatives have been developed, with activities undertaken at different levels, particularly focusing on sustaining the management and conserving the remaining forests on the island.

One of the key initiatives is the Road Map for Saving the Sumatra Ecosystem: Sumatra’s Vision 2020, which was signed in 2010 by four ministers (forestry, environment, home and public works) and 10 governors (Aceh, North Sumatra, West Sumatra, Riau, Jambi, Riau, Bangka-Belitung, Bengkulu, South Sumatra and Lampung).

This initiative outlines the governments’ commitment to developing spatial plans on the island based on ecosystem values, functions and services, restoring critical areas and protecting the remaining conservation high value areas.

Key components of this initiative include the promotion of sustainable forests, responsible agriculture development and payments for environmental services, such as for water services and forest carbon.

An initial good sign appears in the form of Presidential Decree No. 13/2012 on Sumatra Island Spatial Planning, which stipulates the intention of the government to at least maintain 40 percent of remaining forests as conservation areas and restore already degraded forests.

Yet, there is a gulf between a high-level commitment and seeing desired changes on the ground.

To bridge the gap between commitment and implementation, strong support from the corporate sector is required, mainly from agriculture and pulp plantations, to ensure that the development of plantations will no longer replace forests and peat lands.

A recent petition signed on behalf of various organizations submitted to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to save the habitats of orangutans in the Gunung Leuser ecosystem proves the necessity of engaging the aforementioned sector. In this letter, these organizations say that the fires that are intended to clear forests in the province of Aceh for oil palm plantations have threatened the ecosystem, endangering 300 orangutans and pushing the species even closer to extinction.

Another aspect crucially required to realize the commitment is the support and involvement of local governments and people as well as indigenous communities. With a decentralized government system in place, regional governments hold relatively more power and authority to manage and control their natural resources.

Options or incentives provided to help local governments to develop their economies in sustainable ways are, thus, imperative to keep the remaining forests intact.

Such incentives — for forest protection and management — particularly have to be significant so that they are sufficient enough to counter the economic drivers of deforestation, which include logging and plantation development.

More importantly, these incentives have to reach local and indigenous communities, who are considered the users and providers of ecosystem services. Without their support and involvement, any initiatives may yield results but will not last long.

Furthermore, since Sumatra’s rainforests have been acknowledged as one of the world’s treasures, international communities have a high degree of responsibility to contribute to the creation of positive incentives that can advance the conservation and sustainable management of these globally significant forests.

As reflected by this year’s Earth Day theme: “Mobilizing the Earth”, initiatives to save what remains of Sumatra’s forests clearly require strong support from and the involvement of different actors at different levels.

Such a broad-based effort in garnering support is definitely a good test-case as to whether we, the people of this planet, can stand united in creating a sustainable future, at least, for Sumatra and its inhabitants.

Fitrian Ardiansyah is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University and the recipient of the Australian Leadership Award and Allison Sudradjat Award. Thomas Barano is a conservation spatial planning specialist from WWF Indonesia.

This Opinion piece appeared in and is courtesy of The Jakarta Post.  Photo from the OC files.

Rescuers save orangutan in Tripa

Today an orangutan rescue team from the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP), Yayasan Ekosistem Lestari (YEL) and BKSDA Aceh (the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry’s nature conservation agency in Aceh) successfully rescued a large adult male orangutan trapped in a small pocket of forest in the Tripa peat swamps, surrounded by encroaching palm oil plantations.

The large Sumatran orangutan was identified by YEL field staff as being at high risk as the small forested area in which he was isolated is continuously encroached upon for palm oil.  The area measuring less than 1 hectare and situated very near the northern end of a palm oil concession currently being contested legally in court, was bare of fruit, and the large Sumatran orangutan was already showing signs of malnutrition.

“We first saw this orangutan about three months ago and it looks like he’s lost around 30% of his body weight since then,” noted SOCP veterinarian drh Yenny Saraswati, who carried out the capture.

“If we hadn’t rescued him now he would eventually have starved to death,” she added. “We’ve rescued several orangutans like this in Tripa over the last few years. We don’t like doing it, it’s risky for the animals as after they’re darted they fall from the tree and can get serious injuries, like broken bones. It would be much better for them if they could simply stay in the forests, but ifthe forests are disappearing, we have to try to do something!”

Indrianto, a field worker with YEL, explained, “In these situations it really is a race against time. Many orangutans get killed or captured by plantation workers, some ending up as illegal pets. The orangutan we rescued today had already begun eating the shoots of oil palm seedlings nearby, as he had nothing else to eat, and would almost certainly have been killed for this if we hadn’t intervened.”

“Several palm oil companies are continuing to destroy the habitat of the Critically Endangered orangutans in Tripa, including PT Kallista Alam and PT Surya Panen Subur 2, both of whose concessions begin just a few hundred meters from the rescue location. This is despite a number of legal investigations into their activities,” said SOCP Director Dr. Ian Singleton.

Added Dr. Singleton, “We have been forced to take action and rescue this Sumatran orangutan today as otherwise he would have starved to death, and many other orangutans in Tripa are facing the same fate, if legal actions against those companies breaking national laws cannot immediately stop the destruction”.

“The Tripa peat swamp forest supports the highest density of orangutans anywhere on earth, but is still being cleared by palm oil companies who think they are beyond the reach of the law. The situation is urgent and requires action, not words, to save Tripa’s remaining orangutans.”

The Head of the Indonesian Government’s special REDD+ Task Force, Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, yesterday announced an immediate detailed investigation to determine if land allocation for palm oil plantations in Tripa has been in accordance with prevailing national laws and administrative procedures, and if the plantation companies are operating on the ground in accordance with national laws.

He demanded that the Ministry of the Environment and the Head of the Indonesian National Police conduct further investigations. If legal evidence of law-breaking is found, he expects that the Ministry of the Environment and the National Police will take appropriate actions to bring a halt to these activities, to penalize the offenders, and to recover the losses caused by ecosystem degradation within the Leuser Ecosystem National Strategic Area.

Editied by Tom at Orangutan Conservancy

The ministry’s announcement came in response to findings by the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation forest carbon reduction task force.

On Friday, the government-formed task force said it had evidence that palm oil company Kallista Alam had violated regulations in turning the swamp forest into a plantation.

The task force recommended that the Environment Ministry and the police further scrutinize Kallista’s actions.

“We will investigate if the company has properly conducted an Amdal [environmental impact analysis] or has other environmental permits,” Sudariyono, the ministry’s head of law enforcement unit, said at a seminar in Jakarta on Monday.

Even if the company did have a permit, Sudariyono said, the ministry would look into whether it included right to operate inside the Tripa peat forest.

Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, the head of the REDD task force, said on Friday that Kallista had violated the regulation.

“Opening a plantation inside a protected swamp area has clearly broken the law,” he said.

After interviewing locals, the team was convinced that Kallista had used illegal slash-and-burn methods in order to clear the peat land, violating several laws on plantations and the environment.

“Based on eyewitness accounts, the burning has been systematically done,” Kuntoro said.

On April 3, an Aceh court threw out a lawsuit brought by a coalition of environmental groups against outgoing Aceh Governor Irwandi Yusuf, who they alleged issued Kallista an illegal permit in August 2011.

The license allows the company to convert 1,600 hectares of the Tripa peat swamp forest into a palm oil plantation.

The forest was initially included in the government’s map of areas off-limits to forestry activities, published in May 2011, as part of a two-year moratorium on new forestry concessions in peat and primary forests.

However, a revised map issued in November dropped the Tripa forest from the protected zone. The plaintiffs in the suit argued that when Irwandi issued the permit in August, the revised map had not yet been published, meaning the area was still protected and the issuance was illegal.

The Banda Aceh State Administrative Court dismissed the groups’ lawsuit on a technicality, claiming that it was “not authorized to hear the matter.”

The coalition, which includes Indonesia’s largest environmental group Walhi and Greenpeace, said on Thursday that it had filed an appeal against the court’s decision.

Deddy Ratih, Walhi’s forest campaigner, said his group had filed an appeal with a higher court in the province.
“The area is critical to the conservation of rare species including orangutans, many of whom have died because of continuing fires there,” Deddy said.

He said satellite images showed more than 40 hot spots indicating fires in March as a result of land conversion in Tripa, located in northern
Sumatra.

There were some 2,000 to 3,000 orangutans in the area in the 1990s, but only a few hundred are left today, Ratih said.
There are currently about 6,600 Sumatran orangutans in the wild.

Kuntoro, the REDD task force chief, is a close aide to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

“That plantation is inside the protected forest. It’s strange they can get a permit. I suspect something behind the issue of the permit,” he said.

Article by Fidelis E. Satriastanti/The Jakarta Globe  April 17, 2012  Photo courtesy of AP.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/322566#ixzz1rfMj2tt5

The “Conservation Drone Project” is one of the new and innovative technologies that the Orangutan Conservancy is helping to support. This short video, shot from the perspective of the drone, shows how effective this high-flying, low cost technology can be. Future use of the drone can be used for gathering accurate orangutan counts, keeping track of palm oil and deforestation situations and reporting fire forests.

You can read more about this project run by Dr. Serge Wich and Lian Pin Koh here.