 Very impressed with the forest around your facilities here. I had to keep encouraging to keep driving He didn't believe I really wanted to go into the forest, so But they're very nice facilities and David and I recently met and spoke a few few months ago and to arrange this discussion and Realize there's Not a lot of not yet a lot of interaction between C4 and PT recce and I take this as the first Opportunity that perhaps these can open doors between PT recce a restoration forest tree concession to be to utilize Your skills your knowledge and we welcome you to come visit us. Yeah in the future So we hope this can open some doors for further communications Thank you for that introduction. I'm Prior to working for April the pulp and paper Special in fire management and that's what brought me to Indonesia was with forest fire management the presentation Based upon my 14 years of time here in Indonesia working in fire and land management This time is been spent in East Kalimantan with GTZ ten years or so in real with And the past two years in Jambi in some cell with PT recce If you're not familiar with the GT GTZ had a project in Kalimantan for ten years a little over ten years. They had three main Components to that project fire prevention information and operations. I was involved in the operations aspects The prevention of course was studying and analyzing the situation This is starting in 1993 and trying to develop methodologies for preventing fires information side was focused on hotspot data mapping Satellite imagery remote sensing And in fire danger rating systems in the operations side, which is where I was involved was focused on infrastructure and capabilities to suppress fires The fires of 1997 98 focused the project When 5.2 million hectares of East Kalimantan burned this bird at the project from its original goals and Made a huge impact on on how their their future was going to move ahead The main prod aspects of the operations section, which I was working in were focused on of course Constructing fire centers so that there was capabilities to respond to future fires after this incident Training staff, you know getting and other related institutions like the concessionaires Establishing management systems and Supporting the concessionaires to prevent this from happening or responding to such fires in the future What this eventually led to this this project was an institutionalization of fire management in East Kalimantan Meaning an uptd was established in Dines Cayotan on propensity Kalimantan Timor And this was the precursors actually of Mangala Agni, which is now operating fully and out throughout the The fire prone provinces of Indonesia The GTZ project was as far as I'm aware one of the first projects to begin mapping hotspots and assigning blame to the concessionaires and This was some early data. I still had available on my my hard drive But they use this data to document the causes and and and the Who to accuse who's doing the burning? from the operation side again, we were built 13 different fire centers with the close cooperation of the local government themselves in all the major districts and and towns of East Kalimantan You can see most of them are on the coast up and down the coastline where the Ibu Kotas are for all the regencies We also staffed the or they we had the Dines Cayotan on each Regency staff these and we provided equipment So to give a if you will a surge of input to build up capability This all started after the the 1997 event This is examples of the equipment brought in and you know, it's it's quite a huge effort for any project to to Deliver such such things and this this took quite a bit of time and all the appropriate SOPs and training And actually physically trying to get people out in the forest These are government employees fighting fires and coordinating with other with other companies actually In the end if the conclusion of the project, this is from some official documentation This is a summary of the fire causes as determined from the GTZ project in Kalimantan It's sort of evolved With the with the knowledge at that time and and each of these periods that are noted here are also linked to the major fire years and also to El Nino events and Since the beginning you know 82 83. I guess I put the date in wrong there 82 83 Everything was attributed to slash and burn farmers and this was reiterated again in the 1987 event In 90 in the early 90s. There was some acknowledgement of other land users, but not really an openness To exactly who or why In the 93 94 event The primary focus remained blaming slash and burn farmers 97 98 event Subsequent to the hot spot data and mapping efforts There was some acknowledgement that large-scale land clearing was occurring especially dominated by the oil palm industry and Especially the mega rice project in 97 98 and in 2001 and two More and more transparency began to develop in the country And and through the efforts of this project the GTZ project which helped some of this But there was still a lack of clarity Intentionally of who's causing the problems? Yeah politicians Policy makers and others were trying to apportion blame, but not really focusing Who who's doing what and even from my own experience? I wasn't clear either Being new at this time in the early 2000s Moving on to the next April this is where I spent ten years of my career With the intention of improving capabilities within a company previously I was working with government and Honestly, I found Personally that working with the government on such issues was ineffective because who's managing the land? It's the companies not the government the companies use the land they developed the land use plans and So I made a personal decision to join a company to improve the capabilities instead of being an advisor to a government agency Which attempted to and tell the companies what to do so it make improvements from within You may know you may or may not know about April. They're a very large pulp and paper company since 1993 and real I have not worked there in over two years. So some of my data here may be a little dated But at the time when I left they were approaching a half a million hectares of planted area They utilized 10 and a half million tons of wood a year in their pulp mill and they produce over 2 million tons of pulp and Close to a million tons of paper each year now. I think they've got a new paper machine online in the fire management circles April divided their Decessions into regions from a basically operational efficiency standpoint And this is the area of land that that they were managing different parcels The mill is physically located right here in the center and so they would be bringing in wood from all directions To the center where the mill is again when I left This is slightly before I left there. They had they were identifying about 900,000 hectares total land base About 490 plant a bull, but at the time not yet planted fully The thing to note here is about 15% of their land base They did not have any control of It was outside of their control and I know this for a fact and I think that's even higher today to some degree Despite the concession boundaries you may see on a map 15 to 20% of the land is not controlled by the company Other areas like designated conservation in their concession that they're not harvesting on Are also somewhat out of control for these companies the local people Utilize it and then this is another area of cat land use category in Bahasa We say Taliban Ongolan And this is area they must designate in their land base And this also has some level of lack of control by the company itself because it's still natural for us so there's Significant Portion of land within a concession that a company is not directly utilizing is the point of this This is the area of land 55% that the that the large company like this is physically Managing for their financial benefit. Yeah for their for their business What I'm saying is not the official company line any longer. It's what I'm it's what I view what what's what's happening Yeah, we all know what's happened in Sumatra over the years continual decrease in forest cover and It's even smaller today I would love to update this with your help to get current information. I'm sure this would be an Easy task but to to help document some of these things. Yeah In Rio and I'm taking slides and information that I've used in the past for my work with Rio What was happening in Rio? Yeah in the 1980s 78% of the Regency was forested about six and a half million hectares half of that peatland forest in 2007 This was reduced by 20 to 27% forest cover and With only about one and a half million 1.4 million peat and total of 2.2 million hectares Remaining of forest cover today 2014. I'm sure it's much much less. Yeah, but this is Demonstrative of the land-use change occurring in the province What are the accelerators IE underlying causes of this change? Industrial oil palm plantations, you know, this has been a constant development. I spent 10 years Flying and traveling through Rio and seeing this happen illegal logging ramp into legal logging especially in The tesonilo area the last dry land area of Rio That is a focus of development District autonomy to me. This was the most significant thing the Independence of the people from the provincial district down to village level a feeling of it's our time now We can do what we want It's my land not the central governments. It's my land not the companies This is the feeling in the province Migration from other provinces Rio 10 years ago was a frontier compared to set North Sumatra people vast movement rapid movement of people from North Sumatra down to Rio Developing middle-class all these big companies starting up hiring people well educated people steady jobs steady income Extra income they want to invest in their pensions. There's their children's future. They want to buy a car They want to improve their livelihoods. They're buying land Two hectares here four hectares there. They're entering into agreements with local villagers 50-50 cost sharing Staff in my fire department own land in tesonilo middle-class Steady jobs looking to improve their future What I read recently. Yeah, Ikea just opened in Jakarta. Yeah Why because there's a strong middle-class in Indonesia 74 million people have entered the middle-class of Indonesia in the past 10 years significant The aim of all this to enhance their economic status through land acquisition and oil palm development Primarily that's where the money is My observations slash and burn the primary method. What's interesting But I'm noticing in Jambi There's more mechanical land clearing going on in the illegal activities. Why? They have more money to spend on equipment This is happening in the forest I manage now You legal heavy equipment coming in clearing land because it's faster It's what the companies do too. It's faster and more efficient cost more But you get see where you want to be in the long run faster Extreme competition on the remaining natural forest This is in the case of Rio And again this data is this is dated so but this includes the conservation areas Ie tesonilo Karumutan area especially that I'm familiar with At the time, you know 1.8 million hectares of peatland already converted. This is The messaging and the reality that we were conveying at April But only about 350,000 hectares of that converted land at in the area We were discussing where's actual acacia fiber the majority of it had or have been converted to other things oil palm Billow car wasteland some rubber here and there mainly oil palm Why does haze happen? We all know poverty unclear land tenure agrarian society dependency upon land traditional tool No fear of prosecution What's always happening? Well, these dry seasons in Rio, especially and Jambi, South Sumatra basically two dry seasons a year February March and again June through August September And there's three general categories the small farmers the shifting cultivators small oil palm holders There's the illegal land users encroachers speculators grabbers and Then there's this new and developing one small to medium enterprise wealthy gentlemen from Boa I bent I said Bogor. I sorry from Mayden other places from Singapore from Jakarta. I Have personal experience with some of this Investing in land in Rupad Island in Rio in in Teso, Nilo Encouraging people to go in and work the land for them with all of that going on And you have a dry season and people using fire You have an increased incidence of forest and land fires occurring and Basically with ineffective fire detection and response systems You get the haze when the haze gets bad enough and reaches Singapore KL Then you get the health hazards economic losses and political tension Frustrating but repeatedly happening and more so the past couple years than I've seen in a while Some examples from a company Expect perspective. This is an area. We call Logas estate in April Overlapping land the I'm apologize. I'm colorblind the pinkish reddish color in there is all the land that April did not Control in this one concession The legend on the bottom only 8400 hectares the company could actually plant and control 5600 hectares the darker green was what they set aside as conservation 20,000 hectares of this particular block. They had no control of this is where all the hot spots and the fires were occurring Eventually April got to drop all this land from their concession and reduce the size of the concession But before they were able to drop it out of their License they were always being accused of burning the land when April never burned the land It was people living in the area is a physical example. This was a riparian conservation forest acacia here acacia in the distance and People settle in Plant oil palm clearing the forest just keep moving on it. You might say well, why didn't they stop those people? Well, then you get into the social issues. Of course. We tried to stop the people But it's they're claiming the land if the company tries to push people out then you get the social pressures Well, you're infringing upon their social rights that that's so but then there's the inherent problem the overlapping nature of the System here the unclear tenure the government gives the right to a company for the piece of land the The community has a claim on the land and each one is exercising their rights now This is the result the company develops what it can legally and the community come in comes in and develops what it can opportunistically And so you have a decrease in natural forest cover and you have an increase in fire smoke and haze in the in the in the peatlands surrounding the concessions of April in Riau fragmented forest Small parcels of land Being developed day by day piece by piece Some of this is actually in in concessions or the edges fringes of a concession boundary and this we wouldn't we have term encroachment a Lot of these old canals here are left over from when the area of land was logged by a previous Happeha concession that is no longer active Some days now it's private people building canals like this not a big company to access this land for for oil palm development as It gets drier and drier the fires continue to spread without any control systems even the young oil palm burned in Riau I saw this happen repeatedly in Siak Regency This is a very specific case this is a RAPP or April's concession recently harvested the acacia outside the Plantation boundary concession boundary this canal is community land I watched this was dense forest when I first arrived in 2003 by 2006. It was gone community land clearing Slash and burn over a period of years my teams Every dry season would set up Camp and have to patrol the boundary trying to keep the people and the fires out of the concession land Here's another angle of the same photo This was dense forest in 2003 and 4 gone by 2006 and 7 Same on this side too This is planted to acacia. This is planted to oil palm another example overlapping permits Just for reference if you're familiar, this is Karumutan area the Kampar River the Indra Geary River April received not April, but one of their joint ventures received a license for this concession under the SRL Sumatra Young Lestari When they got the license there was an overlap the Pupati had already given away a big chunk of ground to the former police chief of that Regency had to sort it out Company had a license to develop plantation acacia plantations, but they were local licenses overlapping and The company calls me and says there's fires burning in there. Can you please sort it out and Basically, we found canals leading into the concession that the former police chief had commissioned and he was clearing forest and establishing oil palm and Yeah, the ugly nitty-gritty of it We had to pay off the former police chief for him to leave so we could develop the acacia plantation that we were given a nice National license for and then set up a new canal system to not just drain directly out of the peat The company's approach was to set up essentially terraces in the peatlands to manage water levels in the acacia plantation Overlapping permits fires occurring in the concession before we had management control of the concession the company had to take over take Responsibility and and control this This is what it looked like Here's what was happening Business as usual scenario This is the company's efforts in a more I would say systematic methodology of clearing forest and and Systematically establishing the acacia plantation, but not using fire and I'll explain why And just in a moment though in summary what we found in my ten years there is at least 70% of the fires that the fire teams responded to at April Were either community caused by community land clearing Basically jumping over the concession boundary or land claims within the concession boundary Another 30% were from other sources from within the concession oftenly by you know mistaken problems Cigarettes do cause fires and peeps I can vouch for that I didn't believe it when I came to Indonesia, but I can I believe it now The April April utilize the FAO fire management actions Principles and actions guidelines strategic guidelines very useful reference book for any agency in setting up a fire management system April's fire management program was had three premises no burning fire prevention rapid response in Harvesting land they don't need fire and clearing land. They don't need fire Harvesting systems were based on both McManual and mechanical methods Clearing systems primarily based only based on mechanical methods huge investment costs up to three hundred dollars per hectare or more today Why would they invest such money to prepare land they had to plant they had to plant to keep Supply to the mill Why would they implement this they need the wood? It's their raw material Burned wood cannot be used it at the pulp mill it changes the chemistry of the pulping process You can't introduce all that burned carbon into this into the system Organic matter is better to be kept in the soil not burned off and volatilized into the atmosphere Any fires a threat and disruption to operations to threat to the assets Disrupts everybody's work schedules if any fire occurs Environmental reasons we don't want to contribute to smoke and haze that's occurring widely already in the area But the most important reason they don't use fire They could never have plant accomplish their planting targets April is planting and most companies and the other one Which I can't speak of because I don't 100,000 hectares a year they're clearing and planting to feed their mills 100,000 if they depended on the two or three months a year Where it's dry enough to burn to prepare all their land for planting it would never happen They have to be preparing land 24 7365 To keep planting trees to get their planting targets done each year So fire is not an option For land preparation And I'll tell you another reason why because they they wouldn't have a they wouldn't be investing all the money They did that I asked them to when I worked there in fire suppression Yeah, the the teams had targets and objectives for detection initial attack to help give them focus and attention and motivation We had goals set out to in all fires at less than 10 hectares and this was achieved over 90% of the time each year depending upon the weather systems such as fire danger rating systems to to monitor weather and give us an early warning of the of the of the impending weather changes and fuel availability What we found over time, you know 48% of the fires always occur in the high to extreme periods of the year Usually July August September and that's when 81% of the hectares burned would occur. This is 2009 data for monitoring weather and fire danger Like I said a moment ago the companies do invest Heavily I can say April did and I think I believe they continue to In people training equipment And systems. That's why they hired me to come in there was to to push this forward I'll say something on the side APP is seeking help right now. They've lost a lot of hectares this year. Their system has somewhat collapsed. I Don't know if anybody's made PP here, but they're admitting that and they're looking for help right now What did April have by the time I left? Yeah, lots of people Lots of backup firefighters regular employees You know all the training and other things like this Invested over two million dollars in basic equipment hoses and pumps and things like this So they could respond effectively transport boats and pickup trucks helicopters two of them now they have and We were we had a 1.2 million a year budget just for fire management in the in the company to deal with that land base They showed you a map map on earlier other things the company would do which As a fire manager I had input to was to ensure green belts were maintained Yeah, I mean it's another sort of indirect system of fire control to kind of minimize fire spread And this worked on several occasions when fires did get large we kept them from getting larger By having green belts within our in our concessions. This is one that follows a riparian zone, of course But this is one that just was placed in the peatlands just to break up The legally allowed large area That could be harvested and so this particular green belt here is 400 meters wide It connects the Kampar peat dome, which is here to a river Can't recall the river now But it was a basically a travel corridor slash fire break in the middle of a 15 kilometer long clear cut We had several of these in that clear cut Dry land same thing, you know mosaic of natural forests combined with acacia on the ridge tops The natural forest that remains was in the riparian zones The fire threat came from outside the plantations again. Here's the acacia the boundary line of the concession Land development outside the boundary burning right up to the edge by the communities If you will this is a pl land on the outside. This is Hutton Produce on the on the right side and occasionally 30 percent of the time let's say on average There was a fire within the concession started by you know Unthinking contractor accidental, you know something like this But with systems in place to monitor the weather to do patrols You can respond to these things and control them well. The difference is this is an unwanted fire Back here. It's a wanted fire. This is serving a purpose for the for the person who lives in this house He was waving at us the day we flew by. Yeah, don't worry. It's okay You know this is serving a purpose for that individual it serves no purpose for the company The hotspot may show up in the company's land because of geo georectrification on the GIS data, but This is the reality on the ground We did a little analysis in april in 2009 Looking at the hotspot data within the concessions and outside the concession boundaries Looking at the the endpoint was looking at the Trying to compare managed landscape i.e april's land to unmanaged i.e community land Overall in the province half a hotspot would occur on every thousand hectares In rocan helir, it was the highest frequency hotspot Regency in the in the province Pallela one where most of april's land was located had a significantly high frequency of hotspots as well In april's land the undeveloped portions which i described to you previously had a fairly high frequency of hotspots because of Individuals utilizing and developing the land for their benefits Within the managed areas of the plantations and conservation areas april's hotspot count was somewhat lower and there's still Georectrification misalignments that can account for some of these as well, but not and many false positives I would find as well, especially in the peatlands with canals and things reflectances, I guess Moving on to uh, huftan harapan harapan rainforest jambi in some cell i'm not sure if everyone's familiar with the purpose or or knowledgeable about ecosystem restoration Huftan harapan was the first restoration concession in indonesia It's 98 000 hectares of sundaeq lowland forest This represents we believe today 25 percent of the remaining lowland forest in sumatra I would Seek assistance in trying to quantify specify this number better Looking at tesonilo and other areas of similar forest Very high biodiversity values remain we have over 1350 species identified of plants animals mammals and birds We are developing a model for sustainable ntfp business or ha ha beka non timber forest products But we're doing this, excuse me within a very challenging landscape for land pressures in huftan harapan Our vision on harapan rainforest is to protect and restore indonesia's forest for future needs not to lock it up But to recognize the restoration need today so they can continue to be utilized in the future in various ways Just a little more explanation harapan rainforest is a consortium of three NGOs burung indonesia here in bogor the rspb in the united kingdom and bird life international as the umbrella organization This is a june 13 2013 map of harapan rainforest Sure, you can see what's the differences are this is all open land encroached some up here Majority of it in this area relatively Good forest compared to the encroached zones But all of it In some state of degradation no primary forest left our best forest is located In this area in the upper reaches of the lala river what we have inside Our 200 indigenous families mainly in the northern boundary in a few in the middle 2,500 migrant families estimated to now be living inside huftan harapan migrated from java bali Via lampung and north samatra and western jambi as well And we are an island of natural forest surrounded by a production landscape of rubber and oil palm Uh concessions as of uh last month september unfortunately There's been 20 000 hectares deforested over since 2000 in the past seven years The colored areas show the time and the deforestation that's occurred through encroachment Some of this is well planned well orchestrated and well financed The hot spots that occur in in Pt recce In the encroached zone We're a concession just like april we're not clearing land with fire We have no reason to It's people who are encroaching the land and claiming land that are using fire This is an interesting one. This is a summary of hot spot data from 2008 to 12. Here's harapan rain forest Relatively no hot spots in the forest except in the encroached zones, which I showed you a moment ago Outside Significant amount of fire activity Again doing a hot spot frequency analysis for harapan In uh In the three districts that harapan is affiliated with This is the hot spot frequency per thousand hectares musibanyu asan in south simatra hot spot frequency about the same In the encroached area of harapan I don't like showing this but it demonstrates the intense pressure there is on natural forest and the and the focused Um efforts of encroachment that are occurring We have a very high hot spot count per thousand hectares over the past five years In the areas of land within harapan we define as not being actively encroached Very low hot spot count a little bit about you know at recce We've developed a fire management system that the scale and needs of what recce needs similar to that what april had I worked in both places so we have the same equipment Um same type of systems of fire danger rating and training and everything else To be able to respond to fires the problem is At both april and recce you don't respond to fires in the encroached zones They've already claimed the land they've already cleared the forest They've already planted the royal palm if you go in there to spray fires out They raise up their parongs and they say get out This is our land not yours So we find we fight fires along the edges trying to To reduce the expansion of the frontier deep inside the middle you can't do anything more about it You call the police You're wasting your dime sometimes um Summary The current forest and land fires are indirectly attributed to decentralization of national legal structures Which have empowered individuals to develop land in their regencies Land clearing fires will continue for as long as regency governments enable land use change and fail to enforce regulations A complex web of behind-the-scenes players exists that leads to land development and eventual land clearing fires Rural poor seeking land for livelihood enhancement are the igniters of these land clearing fires encroachment of idle unmanaged or unused land i.e natural forest Within and outside concessions is the largest cause of smoke and haze Fire suppression systems can minimize losses to specific assets Rapid response to all fires is the key to mitigating 90 percent of the fires on the concession lands Summary of my experiences in these three areas Thank you