Some officials were quick to blame the disaster on illegal logging, although a report last year by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the Center for International Forestry Research found little connection between deforestation and major floods.
Notes: More news of the landslide in Philippine available at The Australian, 21 February 2006, title Mudslide blame shifts to sodden soil.
Local knowledge should be the basis for scientific research, according to ecologist Douglas Sheil. “In ecological and scientific studies on nature conservation, the real problems are often not addressed”, says Irishman Douglas Sheil, a tropical ecologist from the Center of International Forestry Research in Bogor (Java). Sheil believes in a different approach which he has been putting into practice since 1995 in Malinau, a rugged and still largely forested sub-province of Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo.
Illegal logging crimes are structural and involve various people in a range of different positions. This is also true when illegal timber is auctioned.
Notes: Same story appeared in ANTARA News Wire, 19 February 2006
CIFOR staff accompany officials to see first hand CIFOR’s research in Malinau
At least 38 major flood and landslide incidents have occurred in the last five years throughout Indonesia. It is a shocking fact, but one that has hardly touched policymakers in Indonesia. Many people wrongly think that Indonesia does not have flood-risk area mapping. On the scientific side, there is a widespread belief that forests can prevent floods by acting as giant sponges, slowing down the surface runoff and soaking up water during heavy rainfall.
Security issues in remote forests are often overlooked, but they are now receiving increasing attention. Forest management involves much more than trees, biodiversity and parks. It is also about handling violent conflicts, says Dr David Kaimowitz.
US assists Cameroon in protecting wetlands. Cameroon ratified the global instrument for the conservation of wetlands known as the Ramsar Convention, in January this year, although it came into effect in 1971.
A research study of CIFOR in 2004 showed that none of the 200 plots studied in the border area of East Kalimantan were suitable for oil palm plantations.