Haryo Ajie Dewanto
The CIFOR-USAID fellowship program has had a significant impact on my life. I earned my master’s degree from the School of Natural Resources at the University of Missouri. It enabled me to improve my knowledge on natural resource management and conservation. Indonesia has extensive forest resources, yet there are many challenges related to planning and management practices. These issues motivated me to be a professional forest manager so that I can contribute to assuring the sustainability of the Indonesia forests. With guidance from CIFOR, ICRAF and the University of Missouri.
While there are no simple solutions to address all the challenges, I learned how agroforestry practices can help landowners create multi-functional working landscapes to diversify products, markets, farm income, improve soil, water, air quality, sequester carbon, combat climate change, enhance and conserve land and water habitats for fish and wildlife, and increase biodiversity while sustaining land resources for generations to come.
The skills and knowledge I developed through my studies has helped me develop my career as a program manager for climate and biodiversity at the Rimba Raya Biodiversity Reserve Ecosystem Restoration Concession in Central Kalimantan province and as a Quality Assurance staff member in Britain’s High Conservation Value Network.
Indonesia, as a tropical country in South-East Asia, has a vast area of peatland forest threatened by deforestation and forest degradation. Peatland Forest in Kalimantan, Indonesia, has been heavily over-exploited for about five decades. Before it was the indigenous people, who utilized peatland forests as a resource to produce traditional food crops, fruits, and spices. Commercial exploitation, particularly for palm oil plantation, has become the primary reason in recent decades. In 2015, Indonesia Government applied a moratorium policy on peatlands to reduce the rate of peatlands degradation. Agroforestry practices have been proposed as an alternative livelihood to the rural communities that live near peatlands ecosystem in Kalimantan (Borneo) and as a buffer to protect the peatland ecosystems. A village spatial planning tool is used in determining the appropriate locations of the buffer zones. It considers the traditional land-use of the indigenous people as the base map. The objective of this study was to combine readily available ecological data and the base map data gathered from participatory approach to determine the most suitable locations for buffer zones in the Rimba Raya Biodiversity Reserve. Together through the participatory approach, the communities, government, and private sector conducted the planning, surveying and developing a suitability base map. The other variables considered in the making of a suitability map were ecologic factors (Peat soil depth, landcover, and NDVI) and disturbance factors (access and established traditional land use). The arc-map software was used to model the parameters. The southern area and some parts of the northern region of Rimba Raya Biodiversity Reserve were the most suitable locations to implement agroforestry.