Inspiring a Conservation Generation
In December we hosted our annual Anak Sebangau Festival, an opportunity for our youth club members to stage performances and show their family and friends what they’ve learned over the past year. 450 people attended the event in all, which was a spectacular turnout!
More broadly, in 2024, we hosted 105 sessions and activities for youth club members, whilst work has also continued with six local schools, involving 170 children and 48 adults.
Restoring Indigenous land rights
The Indonesian government’s Social Forestry scheme allows indigenous communities to claim legal management rights over their ancestral forests. During 2024, we laid the groundwork for Social Forestry permits in four new villages, spanning 2,399 hectares. Applications for all four villages have now been finalised and submitted, pending official decree. Once the permits have been issued, we will continue to support the village forest management units, and provide resources and technical expertise to establish sustainable livelihood initiatives.
No major fires, zero forest loss!
After the devastating wildfires of 2023’s El Niño, we are delighted to report that no fires occurred in our working areas last year – and, consequently, zero forest has been lost. This is partly due to cooler, wetter conditions, but primarily thanks to the tireless efforts of our supported community firefighting teams, who patrol and guard the forest year-round. We also implemented a framework to improve stakeholder collaboration as part of the Fire-free Alliance Forum, with 24 members, including local firefighting teams, regional government agencies and NGOs.
Creating green jobs with 5 new seedling nurseries
Five new community seedling nurseries were established last year, bringing the total supported up to 20. These nurseries provide the bulk of seedlings for our reforestation programme, and we purchased 200,000 seedlings ready for planting in 2024. Meanwhile, the number of community nursery members increased by 46%, providing an additional income stream for 52 households in rural Borneo.
Expanding our working area
Previously, our working area in Sebangau covered 214,906 hectares, or just under half of the Sebangau National Park. However, thanks to a new agreement with the Sebangau National Park Agency, our working area has now doubled in size and, in 2025, we will be helping to implement conservation activities across the majority of the national park (537,200 hectares of the total 568,700). For perspective, Sebangau National Park is just shy of the size of Bali, so we’ve got a big job on our hands! The new agreement is also a sign of the deepening trust between BNF and local and regional government agencies, as we become a key implementation partner.
Giving a dam (or 96!)
In 2024, we built 96 dams to block six large, man-made drainage canals, helping to undo years of peatland degradation caused by illegal logging in the 1990s. In total, we re-wetted approximately 755 football pitches’ worth of peat-swamp forest; a figure that we hope to beat in 2025, after the success of our match-funded Big Give campaign, which raised £20,000 for peatland restoration in southern Borneo.
Growing our reforestation initiative
We planted 176,746 seedlings in Sebangau National Park last year, reforesting 252 hectares in total – an area larger than the country of Monaco! We also initiated a new reforestation project in the Rungan landscape, with the aim of improving forest connectivity and restoring fire-damaged areas. Unlike Sebangau, which is fairly uniform in terms of composition, Rungan is a mosaic of lowland rainforest, peat-swamp and heath forest. Such a patchwork of different habitats makes it an interesting challenge for our reforestation teams, and pilot studies are underway to identify suitable re-planting sites.
Putting the Rungan-Kahayan Forest on the map for conservation
With BNF’s support, the Rungan-Kahayan Forest was recognised as a Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) Provincial Strategic Area. This allows the forest – comprising an area larger than Greater London – to be included in provincial conservation planning, putting it on the map for more formal protections in future.
Winning hearts, minds, and sometimes even awards!
On Indonesian Nature Conservation Day in August, BNF received a special award from the Ministry of Forests in recognition of our community development work. The award was presented to our CEO, Dr Anton Nurcahyo, by the Minister of the Environment and Forestry in Jakarta.
Keeping tabs on one of the largest orangutan populations in the world
In 2024, we teamed up with the Sebangau National Park Agency for our most comprehensive orangutan population assessment to date, with surveys taking place across the entire national park. Final analyses are still underway, so we can’t reveal the results just yet, but this is a major milestone for us, both in terms of survey effort and collaboration with the National Park Agency.
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Borneo Nature Foundation is a non-profit conservation organisation. We work to protect some of the most important areas of tropical rainforest and to safeguard the wildlife, environment and indigenous culture on Borneo.
UK REGISTERED CHARITY NUMBER: 1194359