Indonesia, Kalimantan

In Indonesia, Kutai National Park is home to what is likely to be East Kalimantan’s largest population of the Critically Endangered eastern subspecies of the Bornean Orangutan, Pongo pygmaeus morio. It also hosts an astounding diversity of other species. Yet East Kalimantan faces many challenges in maintaining and protecting biodiversity from threats, including climate change. Forest restoration, also referred to as reforestation, presents a valuable opportunity to restore biodiversity and function to degraded areas that were once forested.

In Indonesia, Kutai National Park is home to what is likely to be East Kalimantan’s largest population of the Critically Endangered eastern subspecies of the Bornean Orangutan, Pongo pygmaeus morio. It also hosts an astounding diversity of other species. Yet East Kalimantan faces many challenges in maintaining and protecting biodiversity from threats, including climate change. Forest restoration, also referred to as reforestation, presents a valuable opportunity to restore biodiversity and function to degraded areas that were once forested.

Seven recognized gibbon taxa are distributed across Kalimantan, Java, Sumatra and the Mentawai Islands of Indonesia, all of which were recently reassessed as Endangered using IUCN Red List criteria. To address these issues, an Indonesian Gibbon Conservation and Management Workshop was convened on 20-22 February 2008 at Lido Resort in Bogor, West Java, Indonesia.

This book, written by the world's foremost experts, examines key issues, including law and enforcement, supply and demand, corruption, forest certification, poverty, local livelihoods, international trade and biodiversity conservation. It includes key case studies from forest-rich hotspots in North, South and Central America, equatorial Africa and Indonesia. While there are clearly no easy answers, this book sorts fact from fiction and explores the many dimensions of the causes, impacts and implications for forests, people, livelihoods and forest policy.