It’s 1998, and as Borneo’s rainforests are being ravaged by some of the most unsustainable logging the world has ever known, one timber company is bucking the trend and investing in its future.
Twenty years later, the results of Sari Bumi Kasuma’s (SBK) foresight are clear to see. Elsewhere across the island, forests have been stripped and exhausted of their timber reserves—the legacy of an industry that is collapsing under the weight of its own over-logging. But in over 50,000 hectares of SBK’s concession in Central Kalimantan, towering dipterocarps normally restricted to Borneo’s remnant pockets of pristine rainforest pierce the canopy.
Yet these trees aren’t the lucky few to have escaped the chop. They grow in long neat lines like highways through the rainforest. And they were planted as seedlings after the bulldozers and chainsaws went silent.
“Over my four decades in tropical forestry, I have not yet encountered an operational-scale effort like SBK’s” says Jack Putz, a Professor of Biology and Forestry at the University of Florida. “In South America and Africa, the focus is on reducing the impacts of logging. SBK employs [reduced-impact logging] techniques but then in half of its concession follows selective logging with enrichment planting of seedlings of commercial timber species along cleared lines through the harvested forest.”
Left: a twice-logged forest in Borneo overrun by vines. Right: a strip-planted logged forest fifteen years after planting, where a long line has been macheted through the undergrowth and planted with fast-growing dipterocarp species.
To date, SBK has spent over $35 million of its own money developing this method of accelerating post-logging timber recovery. Every year, they employ over 650 forest staff to machete 3-metre-wide airstrip-like clearings throughout the rainforest understorey. Freed from competing vegetation, like vines, that explode in number after logging and smother forest regrowth, these clearings then act as launchpads for the rapid growth of planted timber seedlings.
“The results are impressive,” says Putz. According to his recent research, an intensively logged forest left to regenerate naturally recovers less than half of its pre-logging timber volumes, even after sixty years. But with SBK’s strip-planting method, recovery time is more than halved. Within just four decades, a strip-planted logged forest can hold more merchantable timber than an unlogged forest.
Starved of revenues from over-exploited forests delivering diminishing timber returns, governments across the tropics are increasingly rallying behind such timber-boosting tactics. But having exported more timber in the 80s and 90s than Latin America and Africa combined, opportunities to reinvigorate dying timber yields on the world’s third largest island are proving especially enticing.
In 2009, Indonesia passed a new regulation opening up sixty-five million hectares of forest (an area the size of France) to potential strip-planting activities. By the following year, twenty-five new concessions, many on Borneo, had been granted permission to commence industrialised strip-planting. And in neighbouring Malaysia, the state of Sabah’s Forestry Department is systematically working its way through its twice-logged forests macheting away vine tangles.
Although successful in recovering yields, some worry that this trend of actively managing logged forests for timber regeneration is just the next phase of degradation in forests already decimated by logging. Planting trees seems much more innocuous than chain-sawing them down. But when only a few fast-growing commercial species are used, it could be a slippery slope towards creating forests not unlike the timber plantations that already blanket Borneo. Eroded of their genetic diversity, such forests are also likely lack resilience against increasingly severe droughts events and could support less wildlife.
“Borneo’s logged forests are strongholds of imperilled biodiversity,” says Dr. David Edwards, a senior lecturer in conservation science at the University of Sheffield and long-term researcher of the island’s human-impacted forests.
“Our work in Northern Borneo has shown that after logging, enrichment planting, and particularly vine-macheting activities can sometimes harm rainforest birds.” Edwards has found that such forests harbour bird communities with a more truncated evolutionary history than naturally regenerating logged forests. They also support fewer fruit-eating birds.
“Vine tangles provide fruit and nesting sites for birds and cutting them to speed timber regeneration removes these vital resources.” Other species, including mammals and amphibians that rely on vines for food or microhabitats, could similarly decline with strip-planting (although some, like insect-eating birds, can benefit from the more open understorey).
It’s any future logging of strip-planted seedlings, though, that poses the biggest threat to biodiversity. Current regulations across Borneo dictate that once a tree trunk reaches a certain thickness, usually somewhere between 40-60 cm, it can be logged. But since seedlings, planted at the same time, will reach harvestable maturities near-simultaneously, there is a very real danger that they could all be cut-down in one go. And due to the unnaturally high concentration of mature trees along lines, such en masse logging would prove many times more damaging to biodiversity than previous logging rounds.
Yet despite these downsides, a recent review published in the Journal of Applied Ecology and co-authored by Edwards argues that timber-boosting activities like strip-planting could actually be a powerful tool for conservation. By delivering increasing global demands for tropical timber within a relatively small area, they could help as yet unlogged forests in Borneo and beyond to remain unexploited. Boosting timber could also provide an economic incentive to protect timber-depleted logged forests into the future.
Often, forests stripped of their timber reserves are seen as having little value, rationalising their conversion to more immediately profitable croplands. In the past forty years alone, Borneo has lost over a third of its hyperdiverse logged and old-growth forests, predominantly to rapidly expanding oil palm plantations. But if logging companies can be convinced to manage their concessions for the long-term—even if only so that they can reap the future rewards of harvesting strip-planted seedlings—then this could defend those concessions against deforestation.
Well-managed logging concessions already play an important role in rainforest conservation on Borneo. Between 2000-2010 in Indonesian Borneo, forests managed permanently for timber performed as well as protected areas in staving off deforestation. But supercharging timber yields inside concessions could further tip the balance away from predatory ‘cut-and-run’ logging (where companies plunder a forest and then abandon it to exploit more bountiful concessions) and towards ‘cut-and stay” logging, where production forests are managed and protected for the long-haul.
Among various indigenous cultures in Kalimantan, tree-planting is believed to indicate land-ownership for the planter. Strip-planting could therefore also reduce the threat of land colonisation and forest conversion for small-scale cultivation purposes. The provision of secure skilled jobs for the growing and tending of planted seedlings would also be a welcome change in a forestry sector characterised by fleeting seasonal employment, or, in some cases, few legal forest jobs at all—often leaving few options beyond illegal forest exploitation.
Seedlings for strip-planting are reared in nurseries, providing forestry employment
“Logged forests have much higher conservation value than the more-or-less baron plantations that often replace them,” says Edwards. “If timber-boosting activities can indeed fend off rainforest conversion, this would be a major bonus for conservation. In fact, even when such activities do prove damaging to biodiversity or forest structure, this could be outweighed many times over by the fact that it’s still a standing forest, not an oil palm plantation.”
There are ways of minimising the harms posed by strip-planting. Introducing regulations that prohibit the harvest of all trees above a certain trunk diameter is an essential starting point. Better still though, says Putz, would be to modify SBK’s original method by planting a wider variety of slower-growing seedlings, thus ensuring that any future logging spans over decades rather than days.
Using a greater diversity of seedlings would also help maintain forest resilience. And including breaks in vine-macheting and planting a few fruit-providing trees could further limit direct wildlife declines. Nevertheless, Putz believes that much more credit should be given to the pioneering work of SBK.
“SBK is on the right track and should be better known. Much can be learned from the company’s sustained efforts at sustaining timber yields and protecting the environment.” Indeed, SBK are perhaps unique in having exercised corporate responsibility and invested in maintaining timber yields at a time when logging industries on Borneo were embroiled in a frenzied race to exploit dwindling timber resources.
But working with the logging industry to secure yields is sure to prove a controversial approach to conservation. For many, it may prove too bitter a pill to swallow, working with the very sector behind the historic ransacking of Borneo’s once pristine jungles. Yet with much of Borneo’s endemic flora and fauna now residing in logged forests, disrupting the urge to replace them with monoculture wastelands has become a global priority.
If strip-planting proves capable of doing this, then in several decades time conservationists and the global community alike might find itself in a very odd position. Having to thank Sari Bumi Kasuma, a logging company, for demonstrating the industrial efficacy of something very simple: Macheting a straight line and then planting tree seedlings.
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