Whales, turtles and timber: news from Indonesia

	"Religion approach" protecting the Aceh forests

It is saving whales in Nusa Tenggara Province, it has protected rare turtles on Bali Island, and it is encouraging the use of sustainable timber in Aceh Province… The “religions approach” is being applied to conservation projects all over Indonesia, and it seems that in many places it is being successful.

On Lembata Island, to the east of Flores, WWF-Indonesia is working with the Catholic Church to promote an agreement to limit the number of whales hunted by the local communities for their traditional rituals, and to find alternative income for the community.

“The activity is led by Catholic Church through a big meting with the community,” said Tri Agung Rooswiadji, deputy director of WWF’s Marine Programme in Indonesia. “At the moment they give a mandate to two or three community groups to hunt whales with a traditional wooden boats or “paledangs” – which have oars rather than engines. After they catch the whale they cut it into small pieces and give the meat to all families in the village. This activity is not for business, but for the subsistence needs for the community.”

Mr Rooswiadji is now working with the local priests “to find a better way for conserving whales and find the alternative incomes for the community.”

He reports that currently between three and six whales are killed every year.

	Hundreds of rare turtles saved in Bali

Meanwhile, from the other side of Indonesia we are hearing news from Aceh, whose forest areas are in danger of illegal logging, particularly in the wake of the tsunami of December 2004, which hit Aceh very hard, killing around 130,000 people and leaving many more thousands homeless.

Rebuilding those homes involves many tonnes of timber. To lessen the pressure on the Aceh forests, WWF-Indonesia and Conservation International-Indonesia are working with local Muslim clerics on a programme to encourage the import of timber from forests that are sustainably managed, from other parts of Asia.

“The Aceh people are very religious, so they would always listen to what the religious clerics say,” said Fachruddin Mangunjaya of CI Indonesia, quoted in an article published in Tempo Magazine on April 16, 2007. (Please note it is a 2MB file)

CI has been working on religions and conservation programmes since 2005, with the help of a grant from the World Bank, he said.

These Christian and Muslim programmes complement an earlier programme with Hindu communities on the Indonesian island of Bali, in which WWF-Indonesia successfully worked with Hindu priests to stop the capture of rare turtles for religious ceremonies. Link here for the story.

Link here for the WWF Indonesia website, giving the latest news about WWF's other conservation projects in the region. A Bahasa Indonesia language version of this site is also available here.

Link here for an early background story from 2002 about Indonesia's faiths meeting for the first time after the Bali bombings - for a conference about the environment.