In the meantime, the Kalimantan partnership aims to tackle the very causes of deforestation.
“There’s no point going in to do rehabilitation work if you’re not looking at the broad drivers of deforestation,” said Clare Walsh of the Department of Climate Change in Canberra.
These drivers included subsistence farming, logging or other uses of the forests and it was crucial to focus on economic development opportunities to tackle them.
Alternative schemes could include fish farming, growing alternative cash crops and sustainable forestry by planting valuable timber species for harvesting. CARE has already introduced some of these into communities elsewhere in the mega-rice area.
RSS