Indonesia to Reforest 2 Million Hectares of Degraded Land Annually

Tokyo, Japan, January 29, 2015 (Newswire.com) - DT Graham have extensive knowledge of Indonesia due to their Eastern Java projects and have made a commitment to assist the government in any way they can to help achieve the ambitious plans. The reforestation of 2 million hectares a year requires a lot of planning and depending on tree planting density, that requires some four billion tree seedlings to be grown, planted, and maintained, or about 20 trees for every Indonesian.

One challenge is that Indonesia has some 83 million hectares or 63 percent of its forest estate in deforested or degraded conditions. So, there is a lot of potential reforestation land to choose from.

A recent study led by Sugeng Budiharta of the Center of Excellence for Environmental Decisions at the University of Queensland and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) provides useful guidance for locating the most cost-effective reforestation areas. The paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters assessed where to best allocate funding for restoration in the provinces of East and North Kalimantan.

One major finding of the study is that restoring highly degraded areas is the most cost-effective option, as opposed to planting trees in lightly degraded forest areas. This is interesting because it is often the highly degraded areas that are converted to other land-uses such as oil palm, because the government considers them of limited economic value. The new study indicates, however, that the government should seriously reconsider the reforestation option for these lands.

Reforestation is urgently needed in many places in Indonesia, DT Graham and other reforestation companies have been involved in Indonesia for some time and agree that areas where the land is in a critical state are especially vunerable . These are often areas with lots of rain, sleep slopes, and fragile soils. A good example is an upland watershed just west of Bandung. The area’s deep river valleys and steep slopes are under the management of Perhutani, the state plantation company. They have, however, been almost entirely deforested by a combination of illegal logging, ineffective plantation management and small-scale slash-and-burn agriculture. Soil erosion rates are high and the steeper slopes are rapidly turning into rocky areas with minimum soil cover and little or no agricultural potential.

Reforestation seems the only option to prevent serious socio-ecological impacts in such vulnerable areas. It would stabilize soils, reduce erosion and reduce downstream flooding risks. If the right trees are chosen, communities could obtain income from tree products rather than the lemon grass now grown on these eroding slopes. Reforestation is also the only chance of saving the handful of Javan leopards, Javan gibbons, Javan slow lorises and other species of highly endangered wildlife in the area.

The above makes it clear that successfully reforesting 2 million hectares of degraded land every year will require large and well-guided investments. Past experiences with reforestation indicate that there is plenty of room for error and wasted funds.