The Sabangau Forest covers 568,000 hectares of peat-swamp forest between the Sabangau and Katingan rivers in Central Kalimantan, and has been protected to conserve one of the most important tropical rainforests remaining in Borneo and the largest population of orangutan remaining. This represents a renewed commitment on the part of the Indonesian government to protect this species and its forest habitat and follows many years of conservation work in the Sabangau. Important conservation issues that are being addressed include illegal logging, fire and drainage. Playing a crucial role in combatting these threats are the CIMTROP Patrol Unit and Fire-Fighting Team. The Patrol Unit is a small group of ten dedicated, respected and hard-working individuals from our local village of Kereng Bangkerai, that work daily in and around the village and Natural Laboratory to stop illegal activities, regulate forest-use, socialise research and conservation programs and restore damaged habitat.

Illegal Logging

The entire Sabangau Forest was once designated as production forest, to be logged under the concession system which limited the type, size and numbers of trees that could be cut. Concession logging was designed to leave large seed-trees intact and to allow the forest to regenerate for thirty years between logging cycles. The last logging cycle ended in 1997, but instead of being left alone to regenerate, the forest was subject to intensive illegal logging, driven by local economic demands, greed and corruption. The Sabangau wasn't the only forest affected - all forests were logged in this way including National Parks and active logging concessions. Although a large local and migrant workforce was employed, they were poorly paid and profits left the region, into the pockets of wealthy businessmen or to foreign countries. In fact, instead of bolstering the local economy, illegal logging ultimately increased poverty in the region, and has damaged the many natural resource functions of an intact forest, including regulating water tables, providing a source of food and natural products and providing home and shelter for indigenous communities. Floods, droughts, air pollution from smoke and landslides have all affected Indonesia in the past ten years and can be blamed on illegal logging.

The scale of illegal logging was huge in the first few years of the twenty-first century. Aerial footage of log rafts in the Sabangau Forest taken in 2005 shows just how much timber was removed. To see these short films click here. Video 1 : Video 2 : Video 3. The Environmental Investigation Agency and Telepak have been investigating and exposing illegal logging for many years. Read their reports The Final Cut; Timber Trafficking; Above the Law and The Ramin Racket and find out more about this destructive practice and the difficulty in stopping it.

Thankfully illegal logging was finally stopped in the Natural Laboratory research area during 2004-2005 by the concerted efforts of the CIMTROP Patrol Unit (see below), who enforced CIMTROP's claim to land management in the area and forced the logging groups to leave. In the rest of the National Park logging was stopped in 2006 by a joint operation by the Indonesian Police and Army. Certainly damage has been done to the forest, but if left alone it will regenerate. Our data shows that between 1993 and 2003 the basal area of trees bigger than 7cm in diameter decreased from 50 square metres per hectare to just 39, but in the four years since this has increased again to 40.5 square metres per hectare. It will take longer for the canopy structure to recover but the seeds of growth are there. And the good news is that the vast size of the forest means that few, if any, of the unique assemblage of animals and plants in the Sabangau have become locally extinct.

Fire

A tropical rainforest in its natural state should not burn, but a combination of dried-out peat, drought and a flame can cause huge, disastrous forest fires. Huge areas of peatland in Borneo have been drained by canals, built either to extract timber or to lower the water table for growing crops. Dried peat can be used as a fuel as it burns slowly but with tremendous heat, and thus it is unsurprising that when a fire is started in drained peat it can quickly get out of control. Borneo has suffered several major droughts in the past decade, caused by a combination of global warming that is changing annual rainfall patterns and the El Nino climatic event that delays the onset of the monsoon season. The final thing needed to start a fire is a flame and tinder. Logged forest has plenty of dead wood lying around and illegal loggers working in the forest start fires for cooking and discard lit cigarette ends. The end result has been many massive forest fires that have decimated huge areas of peatland throughout southern Borneo, and produced huge palls of smoke that have spread across the whole of south-east Asia, reducing visibility dramatically (to less than 10m in Palangkaraya), causing airports to be closed and resulting in a huge rise in respiratory illnesses. Of major concern are the huge amounts of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. Read a BBC report on the problem and see a BBC video of the fires.

To see how much the smoke affects visibility, here are photos of our railway during a smoke-haze season, and again in a normal clear year. In the photo on the right you can see the forest in the distance, in the other you can barely see 20m.

One hundred thousand hectares of the Sabangau Forest burnt during the major forest fires in 1997 and 2002, or one sixth of the total forest area. This occurred on the driest parts of the peat dome, where loggers were actively working. The fires are clearly centered on logging extraction routes. Nearly every year we experience fires in the sedge swamp surrounding the forest at the end of the dry season, although 2007 has been a mercifully wet year. When we see fires we call in CIMTROPs fire fighting brigade, the Tim Serba Api, or TSA. They have to work exceedingly hard to stop the fires damaging the forest, but have never failed. They have a much harder job at the Kalampangan research station in the ex-mega-rice project area, where large fires burn through the peat every year. Putting these out is a difficult and dangerous job, as the fires burn underground, popping up in random places, breaching firebreaks and threatening to isolate people in dangerous areas. During the 2006 fire season, the TSA continued working throughout, fighting fires in the Sabangau, Kalampangan and around Kalampangan village, long after the official government fire engines and other NGO-sponsored teams had given up. The dedication and determination of the TSA cannot be underestimated, and we are very grateful to Climate Care for their support for the TSA in 2007.

Drainage

Peat forms under waterlogged, anaerobic conditions that prevent complete breakdown of organic matter. It degrades when it is exposed to the air, which occurs following drainage. The Sabangau Forest is being drained by canals that have been dug to a depth of 1.5m into the peat for the purpose of extracting illegally-felled timber. Legal timber concessions in deep peatland areas would typically transport felled trees to ‘staging areas’ along skids’ (rails) made out of many smaller trees (the so-called kuda-kuda system), then removing the timber from the forest along a single major railway, tied into large rafts and floated downriver to sawmills for processing. Illegal logging extraction methods are more damaging to the ecosystem. Although extraction skids are constructed as before, most illegal logging operations don’t construct large railways but instead dig a network of canals (usually 1-2m wide) into the peat and remove cut timber from the forest this way. This method appears to be so effective that in many areas small canals (>1m wide) replace skids. It appears that the construction of canals for timber extraction is unique to deep peat swamp forests.

Surveys suggest that some 50-100 canals of between 2 and 20km in length have been cut into the peat dome from the Sabangau, Katingan and Bulan rivers. The canals were illegally cut under Indonesian law, but in practice they have owners, people who are recognised by the local communities to have rights over the canal and immediate area, and who paid for their construction and charge tolls for their use. Many different people are known to be owners. Now that most illegal logging has been stopped many have become disused, although some of the biggest canals are maintained for access by people collecting rubber and other forest products.

In its natural state the surface layer of peat (acrotelm) is flooded for nine months of the year. The peat dome acts as a reservoir, storing water and slowly releasing it into the river. During the dry season (July-September) the acrotelm drains slowly with pools of water remaining in hollows throughout, before the onset of the wet season causes the forest to flood once again. The construction of canals has severely altered this state. At the onset of each dry season water rushes out of the forest along the canals at rates up to 3000 times faster than the natural flow rate through the acrotelm, and the surface peat remains dry for up to four months before the rains come again. Dried peat begins to degrade, and the surface peat structure starts to break-up, allowing loosened particles of peat and other organic matter to wash out along the canals during the next dry season. In this way drainage ultimately destroys the ‘sponge’ effect of the peat swamp, its ability to soak up and store water, and a feedback loop is established which exacerbates the problem from year-to-year. Short-term effects of drainage include lack of drinking water for forest animals, virtual elimination of fish stocks, increased tree-falls and shorter fruiting cycles.

Forest collapse is the inevitable eventual result of the drainage process, because the peat surface layer will eventually degrade to the point where tree-roots become exposed and cannot provide sufficient support. Before this happens there is a serious risk of massive forest fires. Dried peat burns easily, and already fires are occurring annually along the forest edges in the Sebangau Ecosystem. Major fires burnt 12% of the remaining forest cover during 1997 and a further 3% in 2002. At the height of the dry season in the Sebangau there is 600,000 hectares of peat that is dry to a depth of 1m.

CIMTROP and OuTrop are working to close the canals in the Natural Laboratory by building dams. Damming the canals achieves several aims - they cannot be used by illegal loggers; they keep high water tables in the peat by slowing water-flow thereby reducing the risk of fire; and they allow the canals to fill in naturally from fallen leaves and branches. Forty-five dams have been built on 15 canals in the Natural Laboratory, and this is a true collaborative effort with many members of the local village coming to help. The project has been accompanied by a socialisation and awareness program. In several cases we had to get permission from the canal 'owners', but several of the canal owners were arrested and prosecuted for carrying out illegal activities. Some of the dams were destroyed at the start of the project, but we have been able to rebuild and repair these dams and they have remained intact since. This project is ongoing and we are very grateful to the Australian Orangutan Project and the US Fish and Wildlife Service Great Apes Conservation Fund for providing funding to build these dams.