The two tracts of land at the edge of the ancient forest in Borneo were relatively small: One was just 74 acres, the other 195. They had also been heavily degraded by human activity. One site consisted of abandoned rice paddies, leaving barren spaces largely devoid of wildlife. The other was deforested grassland that caught fire every year.
But starting in 2009, people from neighboring communities were hired by a local environmental group to help restore the land. They planted native seedlings, yanked out weeds, dug firebreaks and watered the area during droughts. Aided by the region’s heat and abundant rain, the young plants, which included native hardwoods and fruit trees, grew swiftly, and soon created a canopy.
Late in 2020, cameras were set up on the replanted tracts. The land bordered Gunung Palung National Park, home to endangered orangutans, pangolins, white-bearded gibbons and macaques, and researchers wanted to see if wildlife was coming back.
Their findings were heartening. The cameras documented 47 species of mammals, birds and reptiles, 18 of them at risk for extinction, including an endangered Sunda pangolin and two endangered Bornean orangutans.
The study, recently published in the journal Tropical Natural History, shows that community involvement can play a vital role in restoring wildlife habitat and forest ecosystems, according to researchers.
“When we do community-run reforestation, things really grow back faster,” said Nina Finley, the research manager at Health in Harmony, an American nonprofit organization that conducted the study along with an affiliated organization in Indonesia, Alam Sehat Lestari, and staffers from the national park.
Earlier reforestation efforts with less community involvement resulted in young plants that were vulnerable to weeds and wildfires, Ms. Finley said. But after villagers were hired to regularly weed and water the land, the survival rate of saplings rose substantially, and is now above 70 percent.
Ms. Finley said that addressing the needs of the people living nearby first was key to the project’s success.
Nearly 20 years ago, workers from Alam Sehat Lestari and Health in Harmony began asking villagers around the Gunung Palung National Park what they would need to protect the forest, where illegal logging had frequently occurred.
Borneo is home to 6 percent of the world’s biodiversity, according to the World Wildlife Fund, but has lost huge portions of its forests, largely due to palm oil production.
Residents said that they were in desperate need of affordable, high-quality health care. Health emergencies regularly pushed struggling families into debt, and they paid off high-interest loans by illegally chopping down and selling hardwood. Villagers also wanted to learn how to farm organically rather than continuing to use expensive chemical fertilizers and pesticides that lost efficacy over time and depleted the land.
In 2007, Alam Sehat Lestari and Health in Harmony opened a local medical center and deployed mobile clinics. Villagers could pay for health services with seedlings or manure used for farming, and clinic discounts were offered to villages based on reductions in illegal logging. Trainers came from Java to teach organic farming, and a buyback program for chain saws was introduced. In exchange for handing over the power tools, residents could receive no-interest loans to set up small businesses such as fish farms, restaurants and juice carts.
In the first decade of the program, nearly 30,000 people visited the clinics, and researchers estimated that deforestation fell by 70 percent.
Residents got jobs to help reforest the two tracts of degraded land, which were selected to reconnect fragmented parts of the forest, regenerate a peat swamp and reduce access points for illegal logging and hunting. The reforestation, which is ongoing, also helped the land better absorb floodwaters, as well as provide cooling and shade.
Ms. Finley said combining community-led reforestation with biodiverse plantings was “definitely replicable” in other heavily logged areas, and that Health in Harmony successfully employed the method in Madagascar. Similar efforts were underway in the Amazon aided by other non-profit groups, she said.
The footage from the cameras revealed the presence of a Sunda pangolin and otter civets, both of which generally prefer old-growth forest away from people, Ms. Finley said. The cameras also caught hornbills and a crested serpent eagle searching for food on the forest floor, indicating that a young forest can provide larger birds with foraging habitat, Ms. Finley said.
The findings are a bright spot amid rapid and large-scale destruction of the world’s forests. Wildfires and agriculture have offset gains made toward a pledge by 145 nations to stop forest loss by 2030.
Ms. Finley said that there were early signs that the reforestation was benefiting local fauna. A camera set up along one wildlife corridor just five years after planting began recorded orangutans foraging and nesting there. “That was totally not expected, and really blew our minds,” she said.
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