Borneo project aims to yield lessons on saving forests

By David Fogarty, Climate Change Correspondent, Asia

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Within a vast deforested area on Borneo island, Australia and Indonesia hope to turn an ecological disaster into a global lesson on how to help local communities save tropical forests and fight climate change.

Borneo, like the Amazon, is at the center of efforts to fight deforestation that is a major contributor to global warming and many governments are trying to build on a U.N.-backed scheme that aims to reward developing nations for preserving their forests.

Billion of dollars in annual revenues are potentially in the offing but getting the support of local communities is crucial if forests are to remain standing and the scheme is to succeed.

"The major challenge is to change the behavior of the community. That's the main problem," said Ben Tular of CARE Indonesia.

The NGO is among a number of groups helping Australia and Indonesia develop the Kalimantan Forests and Climate Partnership (KFCP) which aims to preserve and rehabilitate 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) of carbon-rich peat land in Central Kalimantan.

Half the area has been cleared and half is still forested but under threat unless alternative livelihoods are found for the 20,000 people living in and around the project area. Australia has pledged A$30 million to fund the project until 2012 and a full field team will be on the ground from July.

Tular, CARE's program manager for the project, said there had been an sharp increase in deforestation in the KFCP area because revenues from rubber, the main source of income for many villagers, had plunged because of the global financial crisis.

"Most of them have tried to developing farming there," he said of the cleared area of 50,000 ha.

"But maybe about 90 percent of activities have failed because the land is very acid. Most of the crops are dead."

WIDER PROBLEM

KFCP, though, is part of a much wider problem. It represents a fraction of an area of forest cleared in the 1990s on the orders of former president Suharto on the mistaken hopes of growing vast crops of rice.

About one million hectares of forest were cleared, much of it sitting on carbon-rich peat swamps, and more than 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) of drainage canals were dug.

Observers who've seen the failed site from the air, say the former mega rice project area looks like a giant scar on the land, and during the dry season it is vulnerable to burning.

But where many see disaster, others see opportunity in the vast amount of carbon locked away in the peat soils.

The sale of carbon credits from stopping the peat land from burning and replanting the denuded areas could provide the incentive to slow the rate of deforestation, particularly in Borneo, which has already lost about half its forests.