With a baseline rate of deforestation estimated at 69,000 hectares per year and forest degradation at 11,000 hectares per year, this province is facing considerable challenges in conserving its biodiversity.
While economic development still relies on exploitation-minded for developing provinces like West Kalimantan and multiple actors from the highest decision-maker level to local users. At local levels, capacity and resources are insufficient to add value, develop robust business models, access finance, access applied technology, and so on, faced directly by local and indigenous communities.
Bentang partners with multiple actors, from the highest decision-makers to local users to drive the change at local levels with approaches:
Social Forestry
Sustainable Landscape Management
Social Forestry
Social forestry is one of Indonesia's flagship programs, aiming to alleviate poverty, halt deforestation, and end forest conflicts by allowing local communities to manage forests and develop sustainable livelihoods. It comprises five community-based forest management or permit schemes: village, community, indigenous, logging, and partnership forests. In West Kalimantan, more than 300,000 hectares of the state-forest area have been granted permits by the Ministry of Environment and Forestry for social forestry.
For the village forest scheme, communities are holders and owners of the village forest permit. The Village Forest Management Agency (LPHD) is a village-led institution mandated to manage village forests. Since obtaining the permit, most of the village forest license holders, especially LPHD and communities, have been unable to develop and implement their forest management plans optimally due to the following key concerns:
No allocated and dedicated funding resources for LPHD and communities to manage 25 years of village forest permits
Lack of technical capacities to implement forest governance and management
To address these issues, Bentang provides assistance to LPHD and communities in developing project portfolios of Payment of Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes using international standards such as Climate, Community, and Biodiversity (CCBS) and Plan Vivo. These PES projects are expected to attract long-term funding commitment for LPHD and communities to implement forest management while simultaneously improving sustainable livelihoods. We also address technical capacity issues faced by LPHD and communities by providing technical assistance in the following aspects:
Forest governance at the field level
LPHD management capacity
Forest protection and conservation
Afforestation, Restoration, and Rehabilitation
Sustainable livelihoods
Community awareness
Sustainable Landscape Management
We envisioned collaboration among multiple stakeholders to achieve sustainable landscape management. It involves convening stakeholders to build agreements on landscape management and decision-making, promote sustainable business models, and provide technical assistance. Our approach unifies varying efforts, takes action to scale, enables cross-border action, and allows access to more significant financing and higher levels of political commitments.
Our intervention for sustainable landscape management is in the following fields:
Working with key stakeholders for collaborative landscape management
Developing and prototyping sustainable business models
Mobilizing climate finance for landscape management
