John Pereira, Deputy Head of Operations, Restorasi Ekosistem Riau, shares his perspectives on the workings of private-sector led conservation and restoration project and highlights the importance of stakeholder collaboration as a key element of its success to date.
Conservation is a team sport. It isn’t easy. It isn’t cheap. And you have to be in it for the long haul.
At Restorasi Ekosistem Riau (RER) — a unique project on Sumatra that is conserving and restoring a vast area of vital peat swamp forest — this is something of a guiding mantra. If you want to do conservation well, you cannot do it alone.
RER was set up over a decade ago by APRIL Group to restore and conserve ecologically important peat swamp forests and other valuable habitats on Indonesia’s Kampar Peninsula and Padang Island in the Province of Riau. It is managed and funded by the company.
Before I explain why collaboration is so important to us at RER, you might be wondering why a company that produces pulp, paper and textile products is investing in biodiversity protection and conservation.
Stepping back, we know that nature-based solutions that conserve biodiversity are vital for mitigating climate change and maintaining key ecosystem services like clean water, carbon storage and flood protection. But the world is in the midst of a nature crisis, with wildlife populations having plunged by more than two thirds since 1970. Yet globally, there is a huge shortfall in funding for conservation initiatives – around US$ 700 billion per year.
I’ve worked in conservation and eco-tourism for over two decades. Whether in South Africa, Zambia, Mozambique or the Middle East, I’ve seen how hard it is for conservation projects to achieve their aims. National Parks are under-resourced and NGO-run projects often struggle for consistent funding over the long term.
The private sector has a responsibility to step up and APRIL recognizes that land-based enterprises like itself can only credibly claim to be operating sustainably if nature conservation is integral to their approach. That means using operational capability, administrative capacity and knowhow to benefit nature in significant and tangible ways, for example through APRIL’s management of the RER project.
It also means making meaningful connections between the business and its conservation goals. One way APRIL does this is by allocating US$1 to conservation for every tonne of wood delivered to the mill complex in Pangkalan Kerinci, Riau Province. That creates a solid ongoing link between the company’s plantation productivity and biodiversity protection. The internal levy delivered US$16m for the company’s conservation work in 2023.
Biodiversity Sanctuary
A major beneficiary of that consistent funding is RER, a very special area of remote and degraded peat swamp forest. It gives the project financial stability and consistent momentum: the assurance that next year, whatever needs to be done will be funded.
Just as resources matter, so does size. And at over 150,000 hectares, RER is around the size of greater London. It is home to a spectacular array of plants and animals including sun bear, flat-headed cat, Southern pig-tailed macaque and Sumatran tiger. Of the 896 species in key taxonomic groups that have been recorded there, 75 are included in the IUCN Red List, with 13 classed as Critically Endangered.
Our team of over 200 RER employees, security rangers and local labour work to manage and protect the forest – and to understand this exquisite ecosystem better. Last year, the project celebrated its 10th birthday, a period in which that team’s blood, sweat and tears have gone into the ground stopping poachers and restoring vital habitats that were damaged previously by fire and illegal logging.
We’re proud of the results, but they have only been possible with some key partnerships. Just as you can’t build a house with a team of plumbers — you need surveyors, builders, carpenters, tilers and the rest — likewise, a team of ecologists can’t run a protected area. We need hydrologists, landscape managers, data scientists, wildlife tech experts and many other skilled professionals. It is through partnerships that we’ve been able to draw on the expertise needed to advance our conservation goals.
Team Effort
The government of Indonesia and local authorities are key partners. APRIL’s stewardship of the land is possible because of a 60-year Ecosystem Restoration Concession, a license from the government that requires us to manage the land and conserve biodiversity.
Likewise, the conservation NGO Fauna and Flora International has been a consistent partner from the start, helping us to understand the range of species that exist in RER. Their experts are about to embark on detailed studies of the fish and understory plants in the RER, to name a couple of taxonomic groups.
Another collaboration, with researchers at the University of South Wales and the Institut Pertanian Bogor University in Bogor, West Java, is looking in detail at the habitats of endangered sun bears. And our friends at the University of Kent have analysed 7 years of camera trap data to understand trends in the diversity of mammal species in the forest.
Local NGO, the Forest Wildlife Society (PJHS) has been doing vital work on facilitating the development of conservation management for key priority species in Kampar Peninsula and Padang Island landscape.
Beyond research collaborations, the most important partnerships we have —like any conservation project — are with local communities. We work closely with local people to facilitate access to the RER in a way that will not harm the biodiversity — for example through sustainable fishing and providing solar lamps so that fishers don’t use alternatives like kerosene that could start fires.
We are also working with Dutch NGO Tropenbos International to help local communities. In the absence of regular employment and income, some individuals may turn to illegal forest exploitation such as wood extraction or poaching. The aim is to improve the economic prospects of people in local villages through new skills and agricultural knowhow that will provide opportunities to generate income and improve living standards.
We are not aware of any comparable program on the scale of RER run by the private sector anywhere in the world. When the program launched, there was no playbook for what APRIL was trying to achieve, especially in peatlands. We’ve not got everything right, but collaboration has been our way of learning as we go. It is a team sport we hope to keep playing for a very long time.
