FORESTRY R & D DEVELOP ECO MANAGEMENT

Forest conservation needed huge and enormous resources upstream, but the beneficiaries were people of the downstream region like abundant water supply, flood-free condition etc. therefore it was only reasonable that the downstream community owed the upstream community eco-expenses for environmental restoration. Imam Santoso, head of forestry R & D was quoted as saying [Tuesday 30/4].

               

Indonesia who was striving hard to prevent deforestation and planted trees to create “lungs of the world” needed enormous expenses to carry out the plan. Consequently other countries who inhaled oxygen from Indonesian forest needed to pay eco compensation to Indonesia.

The role of eco service at the national game reserve park deserved appreciation. Today eco-service had no standard calculation, therefore the forestry R&D body was constantly analyzing and calculating green service to be used as reference in calculating payments.

In regard in environment, forestry R&D was constantly making research on climate change and REED+. Today they data on climate change had become reference of REDD+ which was under the UKP4.

Carbon trading in Indonesia was today also at height, many international brokers came here to offer carbon trading services. They did the calculating themselves and the biggest portion was for the brokers themselves.

“We are scheming up a national carbon calculating system which could serve as reference for carbon calculating. Once set up, anyone involved in carbon trading must refer to the system used in balitbanghut R&D.” he said  

Research to develop wood products of the forest was constantly exercised, especially on Gaharu wood, madu wood, bamboo rattan which had the potential of promoting welfare of communities around the forest. Among the research achievements were the Gaharu wood inoculation technology which broke the Gaharu mushroom isolates for Gaharu wood cultivating.

Forest micro-biology was also the focus of research; today a certain type of yeast growing in the forest, which could be developed into renewable energy, had been discovered. Thankfully research on forest woods had unveiled certain types of wood which has been overlooked by the wood industry; evidently they treasured great potentials. Sengon and jabonwood which were today the premium products in Java were formerly ignorable woods. Constant research endeavors by the balitbang forestry R&D ha turned this wood into reliable sources of life for thousands of people in Java.

In outer islands outside java where people’s forests were still undeveloped the Balitbang forestry R&D had succeeded in changing palm tree trunks into plywood products. It was a pity that this processing technique was still not widely applied in palm plantation rejuvenation projects; palm trunks were simply being axed, disposed of and let to decay in the field.

Beside palm, bamboo could also be used as raw material raw plywood industry, but it had not been officially applied; besides bamboo was widely used for other purposes. In the future the priority would be on rehabilitation of forest and soil. Experiments had been successful in java with growing people’s forest, but so far not applied outside java.

HPH forest and industrial plantation forest [HTI] which were plentiful outside java might contribute significantly to evergreen forest development management. (SS)

Business News - May 03,2013