Conservation of Biodiversity and Sustainable Forestry in Malaysia (Deramakot Forest Reserve, Sabah)

I had tripped to Borneo, Malaysia from 23 Sep to 4 Oct for study tour of GCOE. Since it was first time to visit tropical region, everything I had met was exciting and curious. I had really enjoyed precious time.

The purpose of this trip was to visit various sites and stakeholders which involved to conservation of biodiversity and/or development of tropical forest, and to realize the current status and ongoing problems on tropical rain forests.

Here I would like to report on the trip, in several posts.

Firstly, we visited to Deramakot Forest Reserve in Sabah to learn about the sustainable forestry in topical rain forest. Owing to technical support from Germany, forest management plans were seemed to be excellent, at least better than that in Japan: intensive inventory, strict guidelines for harvest and retention of trees, well-developed techniques for reduced impact logging, etc... I believe that the systems of Deramakot should be effective for sustainable timber harvest and biodiversity conservation.

However, I noticed couple of problems. One is a lack of long-term monitoring of stand recovery after harvest. Although the damage from the harvest was very small, only four or around big trees were harvested per hectare, it should result in the change of micro-environment around the logged site such as stand structure, light condition of ground and surface soil condition. Especially, regeneration should be sensitive to such conditions. Long-term monitoring of growth of saplings and species composition should be conducted, as well as improvement of techniques of harvest and silviculture.

Another is total balance of the management unit. The reduced impact logging system in Deramakot probably requires much cost than conventional management practice. In the Deramakot system, the target area was almost perfectly monitored: species name, size, status, and even the location was recorded for all the target trees. The area was also monitored during and after the harvest to ensure that management plan was appropriately carried out. This might be additional cost to conventional management. In addition, forest certification (FSC in this case) might be another cost.

Those intensive management is possible probably because Malaysia is still developing country. Thanks to cheap salary and enough human resources, they could carry out such well-developed system. But Malaysia's economy should be grown as much as developed country near future, probably in the next couple of decades. It means that Deramakot system will financially fail no matter how it is preferable to sustainable management and biodiversity conservation.

When I asked above question to the assistant director of the site, he answered that they do not care about the cost because they are government. This answer came out probably because Deramakot system had an aspect of experiment. But developing "financially sustainable system" as well as biodiversity conservation and sustainable resource utilization is necessary to spread this system especially to the site which managed by private company. I hope they continue to improve the system to realize the "real" sustainable management system in tropical rain forest.

Plantation after harvest to assist regeneration

Harvest plan. All candidate tree for harvest is mapped.

Serial number for timber. Number is also tagged to stump for inspection.