JAKARTA — The authority, academics and companies are working together to build a miniature tropical rainforest they hope will serve as a blueprint for the reforestation program in Indonesia’s new capital in eastern Borneo. In 2019, President Joko Widodo announced plans to relocate the capital to Kalimantan, Indonesia’s part of the Borneo Island, to ease some of Jakarta’s burdens, including pollution, traffic congestion and rising sea waters. The president says the move will also allow the government to reforest lands that had been degraded by decades of industrial activities such as mining and pulpwood and oil palm plantations. Under the reforestation program, the government aims to replant lush tropical rainforest on 82,891 hectares (204,800 acres) of barren lands that dominate the area where Indonesia’s planned new capital, called Nusantara, will sit. Forestry experts have cautioned that the program may be overly ambitious due to its sheer scale and because it’s the first of its kind that aims to reintroduce tropical rainforests into a degraded ecosystem in Indonesia. Past rehabilitation programs in the country have mostly entailed efforts to rehabilitate secondary forests, rather than landscapes that are totally barren due to monoculture plantations and mining activities. The programs have primarily relied on techniques known as enrichment planting, involving the introduction of economically valuable tree species, usually just a few of them, to enhance the diversity of degraded but still-standing forests. By contrast, establishing tropical rainforest in a completely deforested area requires a totally different approach, one that involves the planting of…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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