Surfbirds News

Also threatened in former designated buffer areas to the Bukit Tigapuluh National Park are a quarter of the last critically endangered Sumatran tigers left in the wild, two threatened indigenous communities and a significant population of endangered Sumatran elephants.

Orangutan © Sam Woods, Tropical Birding, from the surfbirds galleries

Conservation groups WARSI, the Sumatran Tiger Conservation and Protection Foundation, the Frankfurt Zoological Society, the Zoological Society of London and WWF-Indonesia learned have been highly critical of an environmental impact assessment saying it takes no account of key wildlife and indigenous peoples’ needs and should be rejected.

Loggers have pushed a legally questionable logging access road through both areas last year, opening up access for rampant illegal logging and clearing linked with increased fatalities as tigers are driven into closer contact with humans.

Less than one third of the 2007 forest cover is within the National Park, with the areas most preferred by animals and indigenous peoples lying in the surrounding lowland forests now vulnerable to clearing.

“It took scientists decades to discover how to successfully reintroduce critically endangered orangutans from captivity into the wild. It could take just months to destroy an important part of their new habitat,” said Peter Pratje of the Frankfurt Zoological Society.

“These lowland forests are excellent habitat for orangutans, which is why we got government permission to release them here beginning in 2002. The apes are thriving now, breeding and establishing new family groups.”

Between 1985 and 2007, Sumatra island lost 12 million hectares of natural forest, a 48 percent loss in 22 years, with the accelerating rampage provoking international concern over the loss of biodiversity, smoke hazards from forest fires and peat swamp and soil degradation from clearing that made Indonesia one of the largest sources of the emissions causing climate change.

The Indonesian Ministries of Forestry, Environment, Public Works and Interior, as well as the governors of all 10 Sumatran provinces, including Jambi, announced at the World Conservation Congress in Spain last year that they were committed to protecting areas of the island with “high conservation values.”

The Bukit Tigapuluh landscape is widely regarded as one of Indonesia’s key areas of biodiversity. “Bukit Tigapuluh’s forest have great potential for earning avoided deforestation credits, due to the high co-benefits of biodiversity and an indigenous community, as well as high avoidable emissions.”