Borneo Nature Foundation (BNF) has gone through incredible journey in 2017. We were able to go extra miles to achieve impactful conservation efforts by kind “hands” from our partners, donors, and supporters inside and outside Indonesia that have made us who we are and what we have achieved today.
We were able to bring together Indonesian and international colleagues and partners at University of Exeter focusing on conservation issues in Kalimantan. This workshop provides exciting opportunity to participants to share knowledge and establish new links that would hopefully lead to future collaborations in strengthening the impacts for more sustainable future.
The field projects that BNF carried out during the year of 2017 have also accelerated into major advances. In Sebangau National Park, the number of local fire-fighing teams that we support and dams we built were all doubled. Two new local fire-fighting teams were initiated in the village of Kereng and Sabaru, the entrance gate to the Sebangau National Park forest, with currently 55 male and female active members. We are happy that the two teams have now been actively involved to extinguish endless landfires during this year (2018) together with local communities and government agencies.
During the year of 2017, we also built hundreds of dams to rewetting swamp in order to prevent fires that may hit the peatland when the dry season comes. In Rungan, we have completed several research expeditons in 2017. The team began a series of landscape survey to document the conservation importance of the landscape, while also completing the training for the local community fire-fighting that we helped to establish. In 2017, BNF also developed the plan to formally launch exciting BNF Barito Ulu (PBU) research and conservation programme that has been successfully achieved in 2018.
In 2017, the research diversity at BNF was on the rise. More important discoveries were made and disseminated at international scale publications and conferences. We pioneered orangutans self-medication research that was much-publicized by the international media. In the same year, we also stepped into a more serious attempt to use technological advances on fire detection and monitoring, forest mapping, and orangutan population count by using modified drones.
BNF’s Education Team has also carried out major education programmes. The programme that will expectedly raise the conservation generations. The team has succesfully developed seven conservation modules that were delivered in two schools, plus presented stories on the impacts of fires to more a thousand of local people. The members had been invested their times for more education innovations for the Anak Sebangau programme.
Again, the amazing works throughout the year of 2017 that we have carried out were nearly impossible without strong collaborations and supports from our partners, donors, and supporters. We hope that more collaborations in the future will be established because we believe that by doing things together we could bring sustainable future!
Find more on what we have done in 2017 here
