Gunung Leuser National Park covers nearly 910,000 hectares area in the north of Sumatra Island from the mountainous area of Bukit Barisan mountain range until turtle beaches, mangroves, swamp land and lowland rainforest in the southern part of Aceh province.
This park formerly consisted of a number of nature reserves that preserve 325 bird species and at least 105 mammals species (60 percent of the Sumatran total) such as Sumatran tiger, Sumatran rhinoceros, orangutan, clouded leopard and Asian elephant. The park and the surrounding ecosystem are also important for protecting the water supply, preventing flooding down stream and act as carbon sink.
A development and management project for the Leuser ecosystem was created during the New Order regime. The project, known as Leuser Management Unit (LMU), is a joint of Indonesia government and European Union funded project which is designed to manage the park and the surrounding ecosystem, including protection and production forest that overlaps two provinces (Aceh and North Sumatra) and eight regencies in total of 2,1 million hectares with two million people live in the surrounding area.
LMU’s implement five major ICDP program areas including conservation (park management, boundary demarcation, and law enforcement), buffer zone development (outside the park but inside its ecosystem), intensive zone development (outside the ecosystem but inside the regency that include the ecosystem) and research, monitoring and evaluation.
|
The project already break new ground in conservation by having (a) paid substantial attention to establishing strong political support, a sound legal basis, and functional institutional arrangements at a high level, (b) established a well supported project management unit independent from the ministry of forestry in a provincial capital rather than in the park, (c) ensured continuity between the preparation and implementation phases, (d) understood the importance of balancing positive incentives with the law enforcement, (e) established a flexible financing mechanism, (f) adopted a landscape – ecosystem scale approach.
However, the threats for the park is yet to be overcame. The project can do little about large scale organized illegal logging, poorly managed forest concessions on the park boundaries, conversion in neighboring forest for estate and transmigration site, and road construction in and around the park. The project has been critized for its top down approach and for working principally with government agencies.
The project failed to develop a coherent bottom up process for villagers to participate directly in the project. This weakness made the project obtained inadequate support from the grass root community and villagers that after the “reformation era” are becoming more aware on the opportunity to take some control of the land and extract the resources.
Stirred by the local timber barons with military and police support, who are exploiting the current vacuum of power, the project found itself in a difficult position vis a vis with the “community”. Meanwhile, illegal encroachment and logging inside the park are clearly expanding and are apparently not constrained by any enforcement measure. Like other ICDP scheme, so far, the project cannot address the underlying threat to biological diversity and can only play a modest role in mitigating the powerful forces causing environmental degradation.
Source: Barber, Afiff and Purnomo (1995), Telapak Indonesia (1999), Wells et al. (1999)
