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Timber from a logging operation awaits removal from the forest just outside the border of Gunung Palung National Park. Gunung Palung is a rare success story in the fight against illegal logging inside Indonesia's protected forests. The park has adopted a creative strategy that uses microlights to cruise over the forest canopy, locate illegal logging operations using GPS, and send in armed teams to apprehend loggers. By 2003, when the microlights were first used, logging in the Park had damaged 50 percent of the Park's forests and forced closure of its Cabang Panti research center. Since adoption of this new strategy, illegal logging has gone from rampant to rare. Although logging has declined dramatically inside the park, logging activities around the borders of the park remain high. And elsewhere in Borneo, illegal logging is still at crisis levels. The Center for International Forestry Research has recently reported that 70 percent of timber flowing from Indonesia is now illegal, while the WWF has estimated that most lowland forest in Borneo will be gone by 2010. Gunung Palung is a jewel of biodiversity. It's 90,000 hectares contain a wider range of habitats than any other protected area in Borneo, including one of the largest remaining areas of undisturbed lowland rainforest. The Park provides habitat for a host of endangered species, including clouded leopards, proboscis monkeys, sun bears, and the largest population and Borneo's largest populations of wild orangutans. West Kalimantan (Borneo), Indonesia. |