Focus on Indonesia: Page 8 Endangered Species Handbook

Forest

Focus on Indonesia: Page 8

Until about 30 years ago, Borneo had extensive, unspoiled and magnificent forests. The third largest island in the world after Greenland and New Guinea, it covers 215,000 square miles (Smythies 1960). Prior to recent logging and forest fires, it was described as "one enormous forest" by Bertram E. Smythies, author of The Birds of Borneo (1960); 75 percent of the island was primary forest, and 10 to 15 percent, secondary forest (Smythies 1960). Mangrove forests grew abundantly along the southern and southeastern coasts, extending far inland, lining major rivers and blending into vast swamp‑forests (Yates 1992).

By the late 1970s, an estimated 66 million acres of the country's forests had been classified as denuded (Allen 1980). Forest clearance on Borneo and in Sumatra took a dramatic turn in the early 1980s when landowners and settlers set fire to forests felled for commercial timber, palm oil and tree plantations and homesteads to destroy stumps and brush. This was done in spite of a law banning the setting of fires. The largest forest fire ever recorded on Earth took place in the old-growth forests of Borneo during 1982-83 and lasted for 18 months (Collins et al. 1991). More than 9 million acres, or 33,000 square kilometers, were destroyed in east Kalimantan, including 8,000 square kilometers of unlogged dryland primary rainforest and 5,500 square kilometers of peat swamp forest; the rest was selectively logged forest and settlement areas (Collins et al. 1991). This was the first time that living rainforest had been seen to burn. Half the new Kutai National Park was destroyed, and another 2.5 million acres burned in Sabah in the northwest of Borneo (Yates 1992). Wildlife was seriously affected, and some burned land was later converted to tree plantations (Collins et al. 1991).

During the 1990s, more fires erupted, spreading to adjoining forests. Logging practices involved the removal of the largest trees, leaving leaf litter, small trees and broken branches that dry out (Paul 1998). The logging opened up the canopy, allowing further drying-out of the forest floor, and humidity dropped (Paul 1998). Fires set in clearcuts entered logged rainforest through these logging openings, setting the entire forest afire (Paul 1998). In 1991, another 190 square miles of East Kalimantan burned, and in 1995, massive fires broke out in Kalimantan and Sumtra (Paul 1998). Two years later, an estimated 750,000 to 1.5 million acres of forest burned in Sumatra and Kalimantan (Howe 1997), including a devastating fire in Tanjung Puting National Park, a prime refuge for Orangutans (Paul 1998). So immense were these wildfires that the smoke spread to neighboring countries, causing severe air pollution in cities and towns, and the fires were seen clearly from satellites orbiting the Earth. A Canadian observer from a vessel in the China Sea during these fires wrote to National Geographic (December 1998): "Even at 250 kilometers [155 miles] distance from the coast of Kalimantan, the air was thick with smoke. For nearly three weeks we could not see the sun's disk, only smoke-diffused light. The most astonishing and sad event we witnessed happened one night when we were surveying . . . Our ship was engulfed by an ever increasing flock of exhausted birds and bats, all fleeing the fires of Sumatra. Dozens of birds landed all over the deck, where, too fatigued to move, they could easily be approached and handled. In the morning we found several tired bats dangling from overhead steel gratings. I sincerely hope that a new and more benign Indonesian government will prevent such awful, and needless, environmental calamities from happening again" (Christopher Woodworth).

In Borneo and Sumatra alone, 14.8 million acres are estimated to have been destroyed prior to 1998, still charred and black years afterward (Paul 1998). A zoology student and his girlfriend traveled across Kalimantan in the late 1990s, seeing no green except along roads--small farms and banana trees (Paul 1998). In parts of the region, underground fires burn for years, igniting deep beds of peat and coal seams. The Indonesian government's reforestation funds were rerouted, first by President Suharto, then by his successor, President Habibie, to develop industrial oil palm and timber estates (Paul 1998).

After worldwide publicity and protests from other countries about the fires, and condemnation of Indonesia's failure to act against those responsible, in early October 1997, the government revoked the operating permits of 29 companies that had set illegal fires. This had little effect on fire-setting, as more fires broke out in the following year. In 1998, another million acres burned, and in 1999, an area the size of Vermont and New Hampshire burned on Borneo. In the summer of 2000, smoke from Indonesia's illegal forest fires again blanketed nearby Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore (Mydans 2000). After the fires, floods made the forest loss in Kalimantan permanent by washing away soil, leaf litter and nutrients from the fires ashes (Kaplan and Rogers 2000). Exotic Imperata grasses took hold in many areas, poisoning the ground with substances that inhibit the growth of trees, signaling the end of the rainforest (Kaplan and Rogers 2000). Some 80 percent of the forests in the southeast of Borneo are now gone.

During these fires, wildlife, including such critically endangered species as Sumatran Tigers, Orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) and Asian Elephants (Elaphus maximus), fled the fires into villages, where many were killed or captured for sale as meat or pets. Stephanie Fried, a scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington, DC, who has studied the timber trade in Indonesia, described these fires as the result of "appalling forestry practices and rapacious greed" (Howe 1997).

The fires destroyed most of Borneo's lowland rainforests, where 267 of the world's 600 dipterocarp trees, or trees with "two‑winged fruits," dominate; 150 of these exist nowhere else (Whitten and Whitten 1992). This family of trees, Dipterocarpaceae, has species from the Seychelles to New Guinea, but Borneo has by far the most species (Whitten and Whitten 1992). Many reach heights of 250 feet or more and are pollinated by tiny thrip insects. They are extremely important to wildlife, producing fruits, flowers and digestible leaves that are fed on by birds, gibbons and a variety of other animals (Whitten and Whitten 1992). Each year, 2,500 square kilometers of dipterocarp forest are logged in Sarawak, and these old-growth forests are often replaced with tree plantations (Collins et al. 1991). Elsewhere in Indonesia, these are the preferred trees to be logged, with their unbranched, wide trunks used in furniture, plywood, resins and camphor (Whitten and Whitten 1992). It was almost inevitable that many of these trees became extinct. The 1997 IUCN Red List Plants lists a dipterocarp trees native to west Sumatra as Extinct. Another species is extinct on Sumatra but still survives in Peninsular Malaysia, along with 95 other members of the family listed as Threatened or Extinct on the island of Borneo and the rest of Indonesia. Four species of the giant kauri Agathis that grow in Borneo's higher altitude forests are also threatened with extinction (Walter and Gillett 1998).