BACKGROUND ? CENTRAL KALIMANTAN PROJECT
The Fauna and Flora International?s Kalimantan Programme and PT Billiton Indonesia (BHPB) have formed a public-private partnership to explore the opportunities and risks in establishing a landscape-level conservation strategy for the Maruwai basin, Murung Raya district, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, as part of BHPB?s Maruwai Coal Projects (MCP) Biodiversity Strategy.
BHPB recognizes that loss of biodiversity due to competing land use is an issue of global concern. BHPB addresses this concern in its ‘Sustainable Development Policy’ committing to ‘enhance biodiversity protection by assessing and considering ecological values and land-use aspects in investment, operational and closure activities’.
MCP’s Biodiversity Strategy recognizes the need to minimize the ecological footprint within its operations and mine sites, while recognizing the need to work at a regional scale to achieve the biodiversity goals. In a workshop in December 2007, it was acknowledged that the management impacts of MCP’s proposed biodiversity strategy would focus mostly on the actual mine sites and adjacent buffer zones. The actual future MCP mine sites will only take up a small percentage of the current Coal Concessions of Work (CCoW). While MCP has direct control over the immediate forests surrounding future mine sites and can mitigate impacts to biodiversity in these forests through Leading Practice, it has no direct jurisdiction over forests that could be impacted indirectly through secondary development related to road construction, increased local tax income and labour influx.
For MCP to be seen as a leading company in environmental management, it was therefore recognized that MCP’s biodiversity interventions had to be extended beyond its actual mining areas, and that a larger landscape-level approach was needed. If BHPB can influence land-use in this larger landscape, for example, by influencing the district spatial planning process and securing leasehold rights for forest conservation outside their actual mine sites, there is considerable potential to maintain and sustainably manage a large, ecologically intact forest landscape in the Heart of Borneo, one of the most species-rich places on earth.
Identifying which areas in the current CCoWs are most important for biodiversity conservation requires an assessment of this landscape. A High Conservation Value Forest (HCVF) assessment is deemed the most suitable methodology for conservation planning in the area and is a commonly used approach in Indonesia. The overall approach would also include an assessment of the current land and forest status, threats to biodiversity and analyzing legal options for long-term conservation such as protection forest/protected area designation and conservation leaseholds in the form of an ecosystem restoration concession.
BACKGROUND ? WEST KALIMANTAN PROJECT
FFI has signed an agreement with Development Alternative Inc. for conservation of orangutans in West and Central Kalimantan. The FFI partners with Orangutan Foundation?UK, PT. Sekala, Yayasan Orangutan Indonesia (YAYORIN), and the Global Environment Center (GEC) to implement a conservation plan for a 1.5 million ha landscape that spreads from the coastal peat swamp forest of Ketapang in West Kalimantan, to the foothills of the Schwaner Mountains and into the Belantikan Hulu watershed of Central Kalimantan province.
The project aims to reduce the level of threats to orangutans at a landscape level through reduction of deforestation and degradation of contiguous orangutan habitat. This will be achieved through three sets of interventions:
1) Development of landscape-based orangutan conservation plans and recommendations for a conservation- sensitive review of district spatial plans for district governments and parliaments;
2) Technical assistance for oil palm, forestry and mining concessionaires within the landscape to adopt the protection of HCVF into their management plans; and
3) Development of multi-stakeholder constituencies, and sustainable financing strategies, to promote collaborative multi-stakeholder management for priority orangutan conservation sites.
Scope:
Technical data input, manipulation and presentation of all spatially-reference d data in a GIS supporting a landscape-level conservation strategies in Central and West Kalimantan
Tasks:
? Inventory of datasets required for the HCVF and threats assessments
? Assisting a gap analysis of available spatial datasets
? Produce GIS database with 2000/2003/2006 forest cover maps, soil classification, rainfall, hydrology, topography, HCVF, land suitability for oil palm, provincial spatial plan, district spatial plan, SK 259/2000 forest status map, forest concessions, industrial tree plantation concessions (HTI), mining concessions, oil palm plantation concessions and administrative boundaries
? Compile GIS data layers from field maps, GPS waypoints, hardcopy maps, non-spatial databases, and other sources
? Prepare, update, reproduce, and distribute digital and hardcopy maps for use in fieldwork , conservation planning and external/internal reviews
? Establish, maintain, store, and document GIS data and maps in an orderly, systematic database mapping system
? Coordinate and conduct field mapping surveys to collect accurate, detailed feature and attribute data
? Update data lists and metadata in a spatial data library
? Assisting the spatial analysis required for HCVF and threat assessments and subsequent spatial planning
? Assisting the training HCVF and threat assessment field teams in ground-truthing spatial datasets
Deliverables: Read the rest of this entry »