Project Report
| Jan 20, 2022
Baram Peace Park Progress!
By Jettie Word | Director
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stop the chop
Efforts to establish the Baram Peace Park have made incredible progress over the past year, and we’re looking forward to continuing this trajectory in 2022. This Indigenous-led initiative will protect forests and foster regenerative livelihoods in remote villages.
The Borneo Project has been collecting baseline ecological, community and land use data over the past two years through the Baram Heritage Survey. This will inform plans for the peace park and ensure a grassroots model that is devised, documented and managed by and for local communities.
While communities are organizing for a sustainable future, logging companies continue to threaten forests with logging in the Baram, pushing for timber licenses that will damage an already fragile ecosystem and warm the climate. Communities are hard at work organizing to challenge irresponsible logging licenses and launch the Baram Peace Park in 2022.
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Sep 23, 2021
Data collected! Communities Resist Logging
By Jettie Word | Director
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In August our field manager was able to go to the ulu Baram and collect the final month of transect data. Travel between the city and remote communities has been tricky due to movement control orders to stop the spread of covid, and we’re very fortunate to be able to collect the remaining data.
The logging giant Samling Group has filed a $1.18 million defamation suit against our local Sarawak partners SAVE Rivers and its directors. Samling says its business has been harmed by web posts in which SAVE Rivers reported the company's failure to properly secure free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous communities in and around forest concessions. We believe this suit is strategic litigation against public participation (SLAPP), and is part of a growing international trend of silencing human rights and environmental defenders. We're committed to fighting this SLAPP suit and supporting community-led resistance to logging. In early September over 100 organizations wrote to Samling demanding that they drop the SLAPP suit.
More and more communities are joining the movement to Stop the Chop and resist industrial logging in Sarawak. In a joint action, representatives from a dozen Penan communities of Sarawak’s Upper Baram region stopped the bulldozers of Samling, the Malaysian logging giant that is rapidly encroaching into Sarawak’s remaining forests. According to community sources, a blockade was erected on September 9th on a logging road near Batu Siman, one of the state’s iconic mountain ranges in the middle of a planned protected area.
In solidarity,
Jettie Word
Director, The Borneo Project
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May 26, 2021
May 2021 Report
By Jettie Word | Director
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Our field technicians for the Baram Heritage Survey have just completed their final month of data collection. This was despite Malaysia being under a movement control order to curb the spread of Covid-19 and despite serious flooding hindering our technicians’ ability to walk the transects in the final weeks of the survey.
This is the second time in 2021 that remote Indigenous communities in Sarawak have been heavily impacted by flooding, with many longhouses left stranded by rising waters. These repeated heavy floods raise important questions about the impact that selective logging has had on the soil quality, watersheds and rivers of this region.
In May, 36 Indigenous communities came together to lodge formal complaints about the timber industry to the Malaysian Timber Certification Council (MTCC). These complaints include a lack of free, prior and informed consent and logging that took place outside of permitted coupes. They also call for environmental and social impact assessments to be released to communities as soon as possible, and for logging to be halted in the interim.
The villages we work with will continue to monitor their land and plan towards creating their vision of the future: the Baram Peace Park. Our international research team is hard at work crunching all the data collected for the survey, and we have some very promising early results — including primate data that has never before been collected and indicator bird species that confirm the significance and urgency of protecting this landscape. We are so grateful for your support in helping to make this happen — we could not have done any of this impactful work without our wonderful supporters. Thank you.
In solidarity,
Jettie Word
Director
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