Ecoregional Assessment of Biological Diversity in East Kalimantan

East Kalimantan Ecoregional Assessment: Chapter 1 – Background & Analysis Process
• Spatial information is out of date and inaccurate, especially for base maps and forest
status maps.
Other spatial plans
The German government-sponsored Transmigration Area Development Project (GTZ-TAD,
1972) aimed to develop a strategic plan for the selection of development centers in East
Kalimantan. The intention was mainly to discourage movement of people from the rural
inland areas to the coastal population centers, but also to direct the location of transmigrants
from other more populous islands of Indonesia. This TAD project focused almost entirely on
a commercially viable planning strategy and had no consideration for environmental factors.
For example, Thiel (1980) stated that TAD had as its main criterion of selection that such
development centers have the “ability to form regional units in an integrated development
according to political goals”. The proposed development regions consisted of “existing
central places, their catchment areas, and agricultural potentials located near these places
and areas”. The TAD plans focused on the middle Mahakam River lake country of East
Kalimantan and encouraged it as a major center for development.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Indonesian Program, Kalimantan Biodiversity
Assessment (Momberg et al. 1998) was a pioneering attempt, using GAP analysis, to look at
the capacity of the existing protected area system to conserve a representative sample of
existing important ‘habitats’ in East Kalimantan. They overlaid known important biological
areas (IUCN/WWF Centers of plant species diversity, WWF ecoregions, Myers (1988)
globally important conservation areas, Bird Life International endemic bird areas, existing
protected areas, land conversion types, forestry types, fire burning and hot spot maps and
major vegetation types) and concluded that only nine of the 23 existing reserves in East
Kalimantan retained their biological integrity – and that three of these nine had also been
partially degraded.
There are also 14 areas that have been proposed as protected areas by McKinnon (1996). The
WWF report concluded that six of these proposed areas, as well as some of the already
designated reserves had been irrevocably “lost” and four more severely degraded. They
concluded that “the ability to ensure the long-term survival of Bornean species and habitats
occurring in East Kalimantan has been seriously compromised”.
In particular, the WWF report concluded that the remaining protected area system does not
represent the North Bornean Moist Forest ecoregion (WWF recently renamed this ‘Borneo
Lowland Rainforests’) and the Sundaland Rivers and Swamps ecoregion. Their major
recommendation was that a large landscape area stretching from the mouth of the Sebuku /
Sembakung River to its upper catchment area should be included in the protected area
system. This would represent habitat types missing in the current protected area system and
would increase the proportion of some habitat types, such as Mangroves. Most importantly it
would for the first time conserve “an intact altitudinal gradient of natural habitats from sea to
lower montane forests”. We incorporated this recommendation into our portfolio assembly as
will be seen later in this report.
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