The second Asia-Pacific Rainforest Summit in Brunei running from Wednesday to today has focused on community forestry management to realise sustainable reforestation and mitigate poverty and conflicts over land use.

Speakers from Indonesia and the Philippines shared their experiences of forging community collaboration on forestry management in their respective countries.

Dede Rohadi, a representative from Indonesia’s Environment and Forestry Ministry and a scientist with the Centre for International Forestry Research, said Indonesia has had a long history establishing community forests, with the idea initiated in 1978 but officially implemented in 2003.

“The heart of community forest management is to prioritise the people first and the forest second, because if the people can live sustainably with the forest, they will protect the forest. However, if we have the priority to save the forest first and ignore the people, then conflict will begin,” Rohadi said.

He added that the reason for deforestation is that people do not know how or are unable to use forest resources to earn their livelihoods sustainably, so they clear forests for monoculture, such as cultivating oil palms, to realise quick profits.

“This is why we have to focus on the capacity of people and improve their wellbeing through the sustainable use of forests,” he said.

Rohadi added that Indonesia has two main types of community forests: state forests and non-state forests. About 811,160 hectares of forestland has been granted community forest status by the government and 4 million hectares of forestland is designated as privately owned community forest.

Isabelita Austria from the Philippines Forest Management Bureau also highlighted community empowerment to manage forests sustainably, adding that to achieve this goal it was necessary that the focus started with affected people.

“We have to use the folk wisdom to pave the way for sustainable forest management of specific communities, and it also should be noted that the communities and people are diverse, so the policy to manage the community forests should not be one-size-fits-all policy from the government,” Austria said.

“The government role in the community forest management should be assistance and regulation only.”

She said there are about 1,884 communities that have been granted permission to manage 1.6 million hectares of community forests in the Philippines since the country officially started its community forest policy in 1995.

She also said the implementation of the community forestry policies has already succeeded in reducing social inequality, ensuring food security and wellbeing, and enhancing the adaptation to climate change for many local communities.

Rohadi said community forestry policies implemented 13 years ago have already shown progress in relieving poverty and conflicts over forestland usage.

Indonesia’s Environment and Forestry Ministry highlighted the example of the coffee farming communities in protected forests in Lampung province in southern Sumatra, where the ministry has granted community forestry permits covering an area of 110,139 hectares.

Since the rights to manage the forest were given to communities, conflicts over illegal forestland usage have reportedly been resolved and people can sustainably grow coffee combining methods of agriculture and forestry, which also preserves the ecosystem of the forest.

Rohadi said the success of the community forestry policy has prompted the Indonesian government to increase community forestlands to 12.7 million hectares, or about 10 per cent of the country’s forests, between 2015 and 2019 according to the social forestry programme.

Meanwhile in Thailand, the Community Forest Bill passed consideration by the cooperation committee last month and the bill will proceed to the National Legislative Assembly and the Cabinet for consideration. It has been 27 years since Thailand first proposed the bill in 1989.