the heart of conservation pulse 2011 / Volume 2 / Issue 1 A Future for Borneo & Sumatra Creating Hope for an Imperiled Region Borneo’s FIERY APE Helping communities protect orangutans GLOBAL ACTION News on sustainable coffee, hot fish, and more the heart of conservation 3 Racing the Clock The rich biodiversity of Borneo and Sumatra is in peril. Bruce Cabarle, Dave McLaughlin and Kate Newman – WWF’s leads on forest carbon, agriculture, and the region – discuss what WWF is doing to turn the tide. 10 Protecting Borneo’s Fiery Ape In a report from the field, project leader Albertus Tjiu explains how WWF’s work with indigenous communities on Borneo can help save the orangutan. 13 Global Action WWF helps reduce illegal logging in Peru, protect grassland birds in Nebraska, and diminish pesticide runoff into the Mesoamerican Reef. 20 A Lifetime Commitment A life spent in nature has made Marshall Field one of its fiercest protectors, lending his time, talent and financial support to the cause. worldwildlife.org/pulse Get to the heart of the story. Access enhanced content including video, podcasts, photo galleries and more. Pulse: The Heart of Conservation is published twice Please email [email protected] or write to this address: a year by World Wildlife Fund. All reporting, writing, Pulse, Donor Engagement, World Wildlife Fund, editing and design is done by our WWF in-house 1250 24th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20037-1193. staff. We value your comments and suggestions. FPO From the President Hoping Against Hope up with is to create a global carbon trading market that values the standing forest. But regardless of the price per ton at which a hectare of forest conserves carbon, odds are Some conservation challenges it won’t be enough to catch up to palm oil in are so tough they seem to time to make a real difference. dare us to find answers. So we’re desperate to find leverage in a situa- tion where market forces and the forces of profit are not in our favor. On the margins, we’re working to move production to already- degraded land. We’re working to pull together project-level financing for REDD projects. And we’re working with the Consumer Goods Forum – comprising the world’s 500 largest In his epic poem The Divine Comedy, Italian consumer goods companies – to achieve zero writer Dante Alighieri described his journey net deforestation in their supply chains by 2020. through the nine circles of Hell, the gate to which was inscribed: Abandon All Hope, Ye On a purely practical level, it’s hard to deny the Who Enter Here. Some might suggest he was desire to make money from palm oil. It might be describing Borneo and Sumatra. Of all the the perfect crop – the oil is clear and combines places WWF works, the rate of destruction on well with other products, so it’s embedded in these two islands defies the imagination. Only almost everything we consume. Perfect, except it 50 years ago the forests of Sumatra were as is the leading cause of destruction of the richest S U luscious and intact as the forests of Guyana or rain forest on Earth. wwf Bhutan. Today, they hang on in ever-dwindling 1 © fragments, as the profitable crop of palm oil We won’t give up on what may be the greatest page , tt continues its march from the coastline in. challenge we face: devising a solution equal to U arb the weight of humanity’s pressure on this rich G ick Last year, I talked to Princeton professors David place. Dante survived his descent and emerged © N Wilcove and Brendan Fisher (who joins WWF’s from the other side. We’ll need all our ingenuity er V science program this summer) about framing co and persistence to help Borneo and Sumatra’s an analysis comparing the economic and biodi- rain forests to do the same. nside versity tradeoffs of palm oil plantations versus managed lands. The answer lies in managed H / WWF, I H / WWF, A forests, where some 80 percent of biodiversity SH P U N remains intact and yet income can be derived / A from monitored logging. But since palm oil Carter S. Roberts com . plantations generate $4,000-$12,000 per hectare President & CEO repl U over a lifetime, while managed forests realize a nat © fraction of that profit, the prize is finding a way to close the gap. The best answer we’ve come image er V O C PUlse: THE Heart of conserVation 1 © MICHael Pitts Racing the Clock... In &Sumatra Borneo on Deforestation response, WWF is changing WWFresponse, changing is the face of conservation. of the face is occurring at an alarming rate. rate. alarming an at occurring is 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Breathtaking Biodiversity 1. Proboscis monkey 2. Red-faced skimmer 3. Sumatran tiger 4. Rhinoceros hornbill 5. Sumatran rhinoceros 6. Rafflesia keithii, the world’s largest flower 7. Wallace's gliding frog 8. Horsfield's tarsier 4 worldwildlife.org/PULSE snook reg 5) © G page HY ( otograp PH anting L Dave McLaughlin Bruce Cabarle Kate Newman Vice President Leader Managing Director rans /F Agriculture, Markets, WWF Forest & Climate Initiative, Asia-Pacific Islands and Network Initiative, WWF Oceans Division, Field anting L Programs, WWF rans , 8. © F R P owner D N H O / J illan M ac M im , 7. © T , 7. ...to Save Borneo & Sumatra arwardine C of no return. But in Borneo, where the ark Borneo and Sumatra are two of the most majority of the highlands still have intact forest, we have the opportunity HY, 6. © M HY, biodiverse places on Earth, with thousands to do forward-looking conservation of plant and animal species, many found only planning before the wave of agricultural otograp PH on these islands. But they face serious threats conversion sweeps over the island. anting L from rampant deforestation, which could lead KATE: And we’ve had some real success rans /F doing that. For example, a large block to adverse consequences globally. WWF is of forest in the highlands of Borneo anting L working diligently to stave off these threats became the target of our Heart of Bor- rans neo program starting about six years ago. The forest block stretched across Z, 5. © F while there’s still time. no the national boundaries of Indonesia, MU Malaysia and Brunei and was not BRUCE CabaRLE: arlos Why are Borneo twins. That is, you have species on yet degraded by commercial use, but C an and Sumatra such unique places? the two islands that are similar, but there was a proposal to create a palm Well, during the last Ice Age, life had not exactly alike, like the Bornean plantation that would reach across the K, 4. © JU U to retreat to certain refugee camps orangutan and the Sumatran orang- island in a big strip, fragmenting this around the globe. Borneo and Sumatra utan, or the Sumatran elephant and relatively pristine forest. / WWF- were two of those camps. Then when the Bornean pygmy elephant. To combat this threat, we examined awson the ice receded, life spread out from the feasibility of whether you could L id V these epicenters. As a result, we BRUCE: And the differences in the phys- even grow palm on top of all those A find greater quantities and greater ical geography of the islands contribute mountains, and found that you could , 3. © D diversity of life here than in other to us having different conservation not. So we pointed this out to the three artin M parts of the world. In fact, our field strategies on each. Historically, both governments. Because of this and other N U A surveys show that Sumatra contains islands were predominantly covered by mounting threats, they took the initia- the highest concentration of plant forest, but today the island of Sumatra tive to stop the clearing, and in 2006 , 2. © SH, 2. species ever recorded in a single place. has largely been deforested, while the launched their joint Heart of Borneo martin forest conservation initiative. island of Borneo has not. N U A KATE NEWMAN: There was a moment So in terms of our conservation in time when the islands were one strategy, in Sumatra we’re at the last DavE MCLaUGHLIN: Back in Sumatra it 4) 1. © SH 4) 1. mass. But they separated a long time line of defense. Any further loss of is really challenging because the island page ( ago, and now they are like fraternal forest will push things past the point has lost half of its forest since 1985. PUlse: THE Heart of conserVation 5 Racing the Clock to Save Borneo and Sumatra DavE: …cosmetics, even in your SULU SEA ice cream. SOUTH ChiNA Sea Brunei BRUCE: … and in your bathroom. What’s more, palm is a fantastic Indonesia Malaysia biodiesel source. DAVE: Most of this has been driven S by economic development in China umatra Borneo and India that has really pushed the INDIAN OCEAN increase in global demand for edible oils. Right now, India is the largest buyer of palm oil in the world, and it gets about 80 percent of its palm oil Indonesia straight from Indonesia, the world’s JAVA SEA largest palm oil producer. BRUCE: We see the same thing play out with regards to paper, and the pulp that is made to produce paper. Fraternal Twins Borneo and Sumatra are both rich in biodiversity and have many similarities Indonesia is the world’s lowest-cost in both species and culture. However, there are also significant differences, not the least of which producer of pulp.