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Read more about Land Rights in Malaysia and an Overview of Current Threats facing the environment and people in Borneo

Land Development Minister Tan Sri Dr James Masing yesterday hit out at the opposition for harping on issues over perimeter survey on native customary rights (NCR) land.

The Baleh assemblyman said the opposition will be bankrupt of ideas if land issue is taken away from their political means to bring down the government of the day.

Masing said the opposition knew very well that land issue is sensitive and by twisting the fact they were hoping to make the people become emotional and irrational.

“They (opposition) just want to look relevant. They can’t allow NCR land issue to die a natural death because they will too die a natural death,” the Parti Rakyat Sarawak (PRS) president told The Borneo Post yesterday.

Most NCR land owners however know what they actually want from the government and are glad that the perimeter survey on NCR land is initiated, he pointed out.

“The first thing we should ask ourselves (NCR land owners) is that what do we want? Obviously the answer would be to distinguish what is NCR land and what is state land as we (NCR land owners) want to avoid quarrelling with the state government. Then the next thing to go for is of course perimeter survey pursuant to getting certainty of ownership,” he said.

“We should get NCR land surveyed once and for all, then only will we know exactly the total acreage of NCR land we are having,” he added.

Masing opined that it would be wise for NCR land owners to get their Temuda and Tembawai surveyed first rather than Pemakai Menua and Pulau Galau.

“Why should they want to get the Pemakai Menua and Pulau Galau surveyed first when almost 90 per cent of the NCR land are in fact Temuda and Tembawai? Fight for the survey of what is yours (Temuda and Tembawai) first before thinking of getting Pemakai Menua and Pulau Galau – which made up on only 10 per cent of the overall NCR land in Sarawak – be surveyed first. Why fight for the 10 per cent only to lose the 90 per cent in the end?” he pointed out.

Pemakai Menua is an Iban term referring to a territorial domain of a longhouse community where customary rights to land resource were created by pioneering ancestors.

Pulau Galau – an Iban term referring to a communal reserve purposely left reserved, uncleared and unfarmed for future resources by longhouse community.

Temuda is also an Iban term referring to cultivated land that has been left to fallow for a certain period of time while Tembawai refers to old longhouse site.

On the issue of whether Section 6 that governs perimeter survey of communal or traditional village land should be used first rather than Section 18 (one governing perimeter survey on individual NCR plots), Masing said he prefers the survey to be systematic, starting with perimeter survey under Section 6 as it will save time and money apart from being extensive.

And after that is done, survey on individual NCR lands can be conducted under Section 18, he added.

He said he had never suggested that Section 6 substitute Section 18, stressing all he wanted was for land matters to be handled systematically and economically.

“Section 18 will take longer time and is very expensive to implement while Section 6 takes less time and covers bigger area, for instance communal area of a longhouse or village, but after the Section 6 implementation, individual survey under Section 18 can be carried out,” he reiterated.

“Section 6 and Section 18 are on the process of surveying NCR land but the end result is still the same. Security on NCR land is assured,” he added.

Last Monday, Masing called on the Land and Survey Department to expedite the implementation of the NCR land perimeter survey initiative. He highlighted the need for the department to be more aggressive and urgent in completing the surveying work and ensure that the 2015 target is achieved.

He feared that the surveying work was conducted at quite a slow pace in some areas of the state.

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Learn more about direct support and solidarity efforts in Borneo

Indonesia is home to an estimated 50-70 million indigenous peoples, but the government does not recognize the rights of its indigenous peoples and claims that none live in Indonesia. In a response to the United Nations Periodic Review in 2012, a four–year human rights check-up for all countries, Indonesia said: “The Government of Indonesia supports the promotion and protection of indigenous people worldwide… Indonesia, however, does not recognize the application of the indigenous peoples concept…in the country.” The UN’s report recommended that Indonesia should ratify ILO Convention 169, the only international law for indigenous and tribal peoples. In addition, the UN recommended that Indonesia should secure the rights of indigenous peoples, especially to their traditional lands, territories and resources.

“The Rainforest Foundation Norway thinks President Yudhoyono would show great international leadership by ratifying the ILO 169 Convention. The President has already made a big commitment to reduce Indonesia’s green house gas emissions by 41%. We are sure that this ambitious goal would be strengthened if the President also signs ILO 169 and acknowledges the important role Indigenous Peoples play in managing forests sustainably, ” says Hege Karsti Ragnhildstveit, the head of Rainforest Foundation Norway’s Division for Southeast Asia.

ILO 169 is a convention of the International Labor Organisation, which is part of the UN. The Convention recognizes the land ownership rights of indigenous peoples, and states that they should not be forcibly evicted from their territories. ILO 169 sets a series of standards for the treatment of indigenous peoples and requires governments to consult indigenous peoples on projects that affect them. Governments that ratify the Convention are legally bound to abide by it.

A Dani woman in Indonesian Papua. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is also an important international tool, setting a benchmark by which the treatment of indigenous peoples can be judged. However, unlike ILO 169, the Declaration is not legally binding.

The incessant international demand for commodities, such as palm oil and pulp and paper, is responsible for evicting indigenous peoples off their lands and for the wholesale liquidation of Indonesia’s remaining rainforests. Indigenous peoples are not adequately consulted or compensated for the use of their traditional lands. Large-scale land acquisitions for palm oil operations are rife with social conflicts due to unresolved disputes over land tenure, resource control and environmental degradation. Forest dwelling communities are often faced with violence and intimidation. Some palm oil companies respond to land conflicts with local communities by using company security forces or hiring military units to crack down on dissenters in order to keep their palm oil operations active.

The ILO 169 is the only international law that recognizes the land ownership rights of indigenous peoples. ILO 169 is not just a law for indigenous peoples; it is a law for everyone. It plays a key role in saving the world’s natural ecosystems, putting control of the land back in the hands of the people who have looked after it for generations. Indigenous peoples are thoughtful and skillful partners of the natural world; their ways of life have protected and conserved some of the world’s most intact natural ecosystems, species and genetic diversity. Indigenous peoples’ territories cover up to 22% of the planet’s land surface, and they coincide with areas that hold 80% of the planet’s biodiversity (Sobrevila 2008). It is no coincidence that so much of the world’s rainforests and biodiversity are on indigenous peoples’ lands. Scientific studies based on satellite data have shown that indigenous territories are highly effective and vitally important for stopping deforestation and forest fires (Nelson A, Chomitz KM 2011). Using satellite data from forest fires to help indicate deforestation levels, the study showed rates were lower by about 16% in indigenous areas between 2000-2008. Its analysis shows how deforestation plummets to its lowest levels when indigenous peoples continue living in protected areas, and are not forced out.

Recently, the Indonesian Constitutional court ruled that the customary forests of indigenous peoples should not be classed as falling in “State Forest Areas.” This means that the State cannot expel indigenous peoples from their customary forests. The court ruling recognizes indigenous peoples’ land rights in the archipelago and opens the way for a major reallocation of forests back to the indigenous peoples. The judgment was made in response to a petition filed with the court by the national indigenous peoples’ organization AMAN (Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara). It is time for the President and the government of Indonesia to secure and recognize indigenous peoples’ land rights.

Learn more about forest, climate and biodiversity in Borneo

Karman Lubis’s body was found near where he had been working on a Sumatran rubber plantation. His head was found several days later a mile away and they still haven’t found his right hand. He had been mauled by a Sumatran tiger that has been living in Batang Gadis National Park and he was one of five people killed there by tigers in the last five years.

Contact between humans and wild animals is increasing disastrously in Sumatra as deforestation, mining and palm oil concessions expand, fragmenting forest habitats and driving animals out of protected areas. The exact number of tigers left in the wild is uncertain but latest estimates range from under 300 to possibly 500 in 27 locations.

Batang Gadis is one of the last strongholds of the Sumatran tiger with anywhere between 23 and 76 tigers in the dense forests, making up nearly 20% of all Sumatra’s tigers. But with a single tiger worth as much as $50,000 to a poacher on the black market, hunting is rampant. Conservationists fear that unless concerted action is taken, the Sumatran tiger will go the way of two other Indonesian subspecies. The Bali tiger was hunted to extinction in 1937 and the last Javan tiger was recorded in the 1970s.

Many Sumatran tigers, says Greenpeace, are being killed by accident. In July 2011, one was found dying in an animal trap on the border of an Asia Pulp and Paper acacia tree concession where rainforest had recently been cleared. Others have been found caught in electric fences or have been killed by farmers in retaliation for the killing of humans.

No wild animal is now considered safe in Sumatra. An Australian-owned gold mining company has a 200,000-hectare concession which overlaps into Batang Gadis and illegal logging is encroaching upon the park from all sides.

Other Indonesian animals are faring even worse than the tiger. Widespread forest fires, many set deliberately to clear land for oil palm plantations, have been disastrous for Sumatran orangutans. Thousands are thought to have burned to death, unable to escape the flames both in Sumatra and Kalimantan.

The species’ range is now severely circumscribed, says WWF in Jakarta. Of nine populations left in Sumatra, only seven are thought viable. “The fate of Sumatran orangutans is inextricably linked to the island’s fast-disappearing forests. If we want to save the Sumatran orangutan we have to save their forest home,” said Barney Long, WWF’s Asian species expert.

The Sumatran rhino could be extinct within a few years because of poaching and habitat destruction. A report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature last month estimated that there were now fewer than 100 in small, fragmented populations.

Conservationists fear that the whole species may be extinct in 20 years and are planning to move individual rhinos between Indonesia and Malaysia. Last year the first Sumatran rhino calf was born at a semi-wild sanctuary in Indonesia. It was only the fourth time in a century that captive Sumatran rhinos have given birth. A similar sanctuary, with large pens in natural forest, has also been established in Malaysian Borneo. These two sanctuaries, which house eight rhinos between them, are increasingly being seen as insurance policies against extinction

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Read more about Stopping Timber Corruption in Borneo and an Overview of Current Threats

The Indonesian government may ban the practice of auctioning seized logs as a means for cracking down on illegal logging and timber laundering, reports The Jakarta Post.

“In the future there will be no more auction of seized illegal logs because they have been used for laundering logs with unclear origins,” Dwi Sudharto, director of the Forestry Ministry’s forest product marketing and processing supervision, was quoted as saying. “The House of Representatives is discussing the bill on illegal logging that will ban log auctions. Hopefully, it will be finalized soon.”

Once seized, illicit logs are usually turned over to brokers for resale. The proposed bill would end that activity, instead requiring the seized timber, together with the ships found transporting them, to be destroyed.

Dwi said the reason for the move is to bolster the credibility of Indonesia’s new legality verification and certification system (SVLK), which functions as a stamp of approval for Indonesian timber in international markets.

Indonesia is the world’s second largest producer of tropical logs, producing nearly 61 million cubic meters of industrial roundwood in 2011. About 9 percent of that production was exported, according to U.N. data.

Read more from Science Codex

Read more about Forest and Climate Policy in Borneo and the importance of Conserving our Climate

A new set of long-term climate records based on cave stalagmites collected from tropical Borneo shows that the western tropical Pacific responded very differently than other regions of the globe to abrupt climate change events. The 100,000-year climate record adds to data on past climate events, and may help scientists assess models designed to predict how the Earth’s climate will respond in the future.

The new record resulted from oxygen isotope analysis of more than 1,700 calcium carbonate samples taken from four stalagmites found in three different northern Borneo caves. The results suggest that climate feedbacks within the tropical regions may amplify and prolong abrupt climate change events that were first discovered in the North Atlantic.

The results were scheduled to be published June 6 in Science Express, the electronic advance online publication of the journal Science, and will appear later in an issue of printed publication. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Today, relatively subtle changes in the tropical Pacific’s ocean and atmosphere have profound effects on global climate. However, there are few records of past climate changes in this key region that have the length, resolution and age controls needed to reveal the area’s response to abrupt climate change events.

“This is a new record from a very important area of the world,” said Kim Cobb, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “This record will provide a new piece of the puzzle from the tropical Pacific showing us how that climate system has responded to forcing events over the past 100,000 years.”

Among the findings were some surprises that show just how complicated the Earth’s climate system can be. While the stalagmite record reflected responses to abrupt changes known as Heinrich events, another major type of event – known as Dansgaard-Oeschger excursions – left no evidence in the Borneo stalagmites. Both types of abrupt climate change events are prominently featured in a previously-published stalagmite climate record from China – which is only slightly north of Borneo.

“To my knowledge, this is the first record that so clearly shows sensitivity to one set of major abrupt climate change events and not another,” said Cobb. “These two types of abrupt change events appear to have different degrees of tropical Pacific involvement, and because the tropical Pacific speaks with such a loud voice when it does speak, we think this is extremely important for understanding the mechanisms underlying these events.”

The researchers were also surprised to discover a very large and abrupt signal in their stalagmite climate records precisely when super-volcano Toba erupted nearby, roughly 74,000 years ago.

The team recovered the stalagmites from caves in Gunung Mulu and Gunung Buda National Parks, in northern Borneo, which is located a few degrees north of the Equator in the western Pacific. Back at their Georgia Tech lab, they analyzed the stalagmites for the ratio of oxygen isotopes contained in samples of calcium carbonate, the material from which the stalagmites were formed. That ratio is set by the oxygen isotopes in rainfall at the site, as the water that seeped into the ground dissolved limestone rock and dripped into the caves to form the stalagmites. The stalagmites accumulate at a rate of roughly one centimeter every thousand years.

“Stalagmites are time capsules of climate signals from thousands of years in the past,” said Stacy Carolin, a Georgia Tech Ph.D. candidate who gathered and analyzed the stalagmites. “We have instrumental records of climate only for the past 100 years or so, and if we want to look deeper into the past, we have to find records like these that locked in climate signals we can extract today.”

In the laboratory, Carolin sawed each stalagmite in half, opening it like a hot dog bun. She then used a tiny drill bit to take samples of the calcium carbonate down the center at one-millimeter steps. Because the stalagmites grew at varying rates, each sample represented as little as 60 years of time, or as much as 200 years. The precise ages of the samples were determined by measuring uranium and thorium isotope ratios, an analysis done with the help of Jess F. Adkins, a professor at the California Institute of Technology and a co-author of the study.

Rainfall oxygen isotopic ratios are good indicators of the amount of rainfall occurring throughout the region, as determined by a modern-day calibration study recently published by another graduate student in Cobb’s lab.

Merging data from the four different stalagmites provided a record of precipitation trends in the western Pacific over the past 100,000 years. That information can be compared to stalagmite and ice core climate records obtained elsewhere in the world.

“This record, which spans the entire last glacial period, adds significantly to the understanding of how various climate forcings are felt by the western tropical Pacific,” Carolin added.

Climate scientists are interested in learning more about abrupt climate changes because they indicate that the climate system may have “tipping points.” So far, the climate system has responded to rising carbon dioxide levels at a fairly steady rate, but many scientists worry about possible nonlinear effects.

“As a society, we haven’t really thought enough about the fact that we are moving Earth’s climate system toward a new state very quickly,” said Cobb. “It’s important to remember that the climate system has important nonlinearities that are most evident in these abrupt climate events. Ultimately, we’d like to be able to reproduce the global signatures of these abrupt climate events with numerical models of the climate system, and investigate the physics that drive such events.”

For Carolin, studying the half-meter-long stalagmites brought an awareness that the Earth has not always been as we know it today.

“You have to be impressed with the scope of what you are studying, and recognize that the state our climate is in today is incredibly different from Earth’s climate during the last Ice Age,” she said. “As we consider how humans may be affecting climate, dissecting what was going on tens of thousands of years ago in all regions of the globe can help scientists better predict how the Earth will respond to modern climate forcings.”

A forest project that uses solar-powered smartphones hanging from trees to listen for the sounds of chainsaws could help stop illegal logging. Read more below. 

Read more from New Scientist

Learn more about timber corruption in Borneo

A chainsaw revs in a remote swathe of the Indonesian rainforest. Within minutes, rangers appear as if from nowhere, stopping illegal loggers in their tracks and saving countless trees. How did they know? A tip off from a recycled cellphone hanging hundreds of meters away in the forest.

Read more from Science World Report

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Amphibians are one of the most threatened groups of species in the world. Now, researchers have found something else that should worry us. They’ve discovered that oil palm plantations in Malaysia are causing threatened forest frogs to disappear as they’re replaced by common species that move in on their turf.

Amphibians play a crucial role in ecosystems. They act as efficient predators of insects and also provide valuable nutrients to creatures further up the food chain. In addition, some play an important role in nutrient cycling.Despite all of these positives, though, amphibians have been declining rapidly. In fact, researchers found in another study that overall, populations of amphibians are vanishing from their habitats at a rate of about 3.7 percent each year–that means these species will disappear from half of their habitats in about 20 years.

Unfortunately, it seems that this same trend is occurring in frog populations. Planting oil palm plantations leads to the loss of natural forests and peat lands. In addition, the practice plays havoc with ecosystems and biodiversity. In order to examine how this affects native species, researchers travelled to Peninsular Malaysia and spent two years studying communities of frog species in four oil palm plantations and two areas of adjacent forest.

“The impact we observed is different from that observed previously for mammals and birds,” said Aisyah Faruk, one of the researchers, in a news release. ”Instead of reducing the number of species, oil palm affects amphibian communities by replacing habitat suitable for threatened species with habitat used by amphibian species that are not important for conservation. This more subtle effect is equally devastating for the conservation of biodiversity in Malaysia.”

Amphibians are the most threatened vertebrates in the world, and about 40 percent of them are at risk of extinction. This particular phenomenon in Malaysia may just hurry some frog species on their way to an eventual population collapse. The peat swamp frog is just one of the declining species currently threatened due to the deforestation. Since it only inhabits shallow gentle streams, swampy areas and very flat forests, it’s likely to disappear entirely if palm oil plantations continue to take over the area.

“Existing practices in managing oil palm are not accommodating the highly threatened forest frog species in Malaysia which urgently need saving,” said co-author Trent Garner, one of the researchers, in a news release.

Currently, the researchers are trying to figure out a way to make oil palm planting sustainable. They’re working with Malaysian palm oil producers in order to determine if simple modifications to agricultural practices may bring back some of the forest species into certain areas.

The findings are published in the journal Conservation Biology.

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Watch the video footage of illegal logging from the Environmental Investigation Agency

A former police officer has been arrested in Indonesia for orchestrating a $150 million illegal logging ring in Indonesian New Guinea.

Labora Sitorus was identified after an investigation by the Indonesia Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Center (PPATK) which linked his company, PT Rotua, to a recent seizure of 115 containers worth of illegally-logged merbau timber in Surabaya. A further 1,500 merbau logs have been seized in Papua, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), an environmental group that documented Sitorus’ involvement as early as 2009.

PPATK has estimated that $150 million has passed through PT Rotua’s bank accounts in the past five years. The logging ring, which was centered on the Raja Ampat Islands of West Papua, also involved illegal trapping of endangered birds for the pet trade, according to EIA, which is calling upon the Indonesian government to fully prosecute the case.

“It is imperative that Indonesia now properly investigates and prosecutes this case, including all the actors in the timber chain downstream from Sitorus and any protectors in the police or other authorities who have allowed his crimes to go unpunished for so long,” said EIA’s Faith Doherty in a statement.

She added that the involvement of government officials in illegal timber trafficking raises concerns about the country’s recently launched timber traceability scheme known as the Timber Legality Verification System (SVLK).

“Long-term police involvement in major illegal logging and export-oriented timber trade is of great concern to EU importers of Indonesian wood products, and no doubt to the EU itself which has been very supportive of Indonesia in the development of the SVLK,” Doherty said. “Just as the EU Timber Regulation comes into force, the Sitorus case makes it difficult to believe all is well in Indonesia’s timber trade. It is imperative Indonesia protects the reputational gains the SVLK is bringing it by showing the world it can successfully prosecute this blatant case of police corruption.”

Illegal logging for merbau timber in Indonesian New Guinea has been rampant in recent years. Most of the timber is bound for China.

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The government has said it will revoke business permits it has given to companies operating in customary forests after the Constitutional Court annulled its ownership of customary forests.

Forestry Ministry’s secretary general, Hadi Daryanto, said on Monday that the government would rescind all plantation and mining concessions that have been granted to businesses in customary forests that have been legally recognized by the local administrations.

“We’ll get them [businesses] out. Even if there’s a concession for HTI [industrial forest permits] or HPH [production forest concessions] as long as there’s a bylaw then the businesses will have to leave,” Hadi said.

However, as of now, no regional administration has issued a bylaw on customary forests.

The court last week decided to scrap the word “state” from Article 1 of the 1999 Forestry Law, which says “customary forests are state forests located in the areas of custom-based communities”.

The court also ruled that the government had to recognize indigenous communities’ ownership of customary forests, saying that “indigenous peoples have the right to own and exploit their customary forests to meet their daily need.”

The ruling has been seen as a victory for the indigenous people, who have long had their rights to make a living by making productive use of their forests denied by the state.

Indigenous People’s Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN) secretary general Abdon Nababan said that relying on regional administrations to issue a bylaw on customary forests without a directive from the central government will risk reducing the court’s ruling to that of a paper tiger.

He doubted that it was financially feasible to have customary forests recognized through a bylaw.

“There can be dozens of customary forests in one regency. Will this regency have dozens of bylaws on customary forests? The cost to stipulate one bylaw in a regency is between Rp 400 million (US$40,850) to 700 million. If there are around 10 identified customary forests, it would cost between Rp 4 billion to Rp 10 billion to recognize customary forests in one regency,” Abdon said.

“And it’s proven that for 14 years since the passing of the Forestry Law, not one customary forest has been recognized,” he said.

Abdon said the president should release a decree for a registration mechanism of indigenous people communities and customary forests to start the restitution process of indigenous peoples’ forests.

Currently there is no official government data on the number of existing indigenous communities and the size and territory of their customary land and forests.

A civil society led mapping of indigenous land by The Participative Mapping Working Network (JKPP) has documented 3.9 million hectares of indigenous land, of which 3.1 million hectares are forest areas, JKPP coordinator Kasmita Widodo said.

JKPP has submitted their preliminary mapping of 2.4 million hectares of customary forests to the Presidential Working Unit for the Supervision and Management of Development (UKP4), currently working on an integrated map of Indonesia.

Nirarta Samadi, the UKP4 Deputy and Chair of the REDD+ Task Force Working Group on Forest Monitoring, said that the reason there have not yet been any bylaws recognizing customary forests was due to the previous status of customary forests as state forest. “Now we have an opportunity for a new process,” he said referring to the MK ruling. “It feels right now to use the avenue of bylaws and a political decision is indeed needed to create a positive atmosphere,” he said.

Hadi said that it was the ministry’s task to draft a government regulation to force local administrations to acknowledge customary forests in bylaws.

Source: The Jakarta Post

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Learn more about efforts to stop mega dams in Borneo 

Richard Taylor, the president of the International Hydropower Association, left the air-conditioned interior of the Borneo Convention Center on Wednesday to face a crowd of more than 300 indigenous people. The protesters had traveled to Kuching, the capital city of the Malaysian state of Sarawak, from villages far in the state’s interior that will soon be underwater if a series of proposed hydroelectric dams is built. They had traveled many miles by boat and by bus to protest at the association’s biannual conference, which promotes the construction of dams around the world—including here in Borneo where one of the world’s largest dam projects is in the works.

“We are talking about the end of this race,” Kallang said. “They will lose their culture, way of life, and language.”

Taylor took a microphone and told the crowd that protests were not the right way to get their message out. The hydropower association wanted to help them, he said, and if the villagers didn’t like the dams, then they should talk to the government and to the construction companies and work out an agreement.

The people were not convinced, says Brihannala Morgan of the nonprofit Borneo Project, who described the villagers’ response as follows: “We’ve tried talking to you so many times, and you haven’t listened. This is our last resort.”

The Malaysian state of Sarawak spans much of the northern coast of Borneo—a Southeast Asian island twice the size of Germany that is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. Orangutans climb through its trees, seven different species of hornbills scatter its seeds, and rare cloud leopards prowl its forests.

That diversity isn’t limited to plants and animals. About 40 indigenous ethnic groups live in Sarawak’s rainforests, according to MinorityVoices.org. Most are subsistence farmers who also grow cash crops to buy commodities like clothing and sugar, says Peter Kallang, a full-time organizer with the Save Rivers Network, which advocates for the indigenous people of Sarawak. Other groups are even more isolated from the modern world, and continue a nomadic life and hunting and gathering.

The dams would flood areas that add up to about twice the size of Los Angeles.

But over the past several decades, aggressive logging and development has disrupted what remains of the indigenous way of life here. Kallang says that only 5 percent of the Sarawak’s original forests remain undisturbed. The rest has either been thinned out, or clear-cut and converted into palm oil plantations or industrial tree farms harvested regularly for the production of paper. Indigenous peoples have fewer and fewer acres of land on which to live in their traditional way.

On top of that deforestation, the government of Sarawak now plans a series of “megadams” that are part of what it calls the Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy, or SCORE. The project would involve building between nine and 12 hydroelectric dams, which would generate about 20,000 megawatts of power, according to the Yale Environment Review. The dams would flood areas that add up to about 2,300 square kilometers, according to a study of Sarawak Energy’s own numbers conducted by the Swiss nonprofit the Bruno Manser Fund—an area about twice the size of Los Angeles. While it’s difficult to quantify the exact number of people that will be displaced, the same study concludes that 235 settlements will be affected.

“They’re going to build these dams, flood this area, and force the natives out of the little land they have left,” Kallang told YES! by Skype. “We are talking about the end of this race. They will lose their culture, way of life, and language.”

Importantly, no customers currently exist for that electricity, Morgan adds. Instead, the plan is to build the dams first and then hope to attract industries, such as aluminum smelters, to the area later through promises of cheap power.

But the story may not have to end that way. In the past, the government has been able to win the agreement of indigenous people through promises and cash and new homes. That’s what happened in 1998, when about 10,000 people were resettled to make room for the Bakun Dam—currently the largest dam in Asia outside of China—which left their villages underwater. After resettlement, many reported that they had received less land than they were promised, according to the hydropower watchdog group International Rivers. And in many cases their new lands were not appropriate for farming.

Kallang says he expects similar treatment for people resettled for the new dams. “Probably they’ll be put in the center of palm oil plantations that belong to big companies in Malaysia,” he says. “The government expects these people to work in these plantations.”

That fear has led Sarawak’s indigenous people to organize themselves in a new way. Formed in October 2011, the Save Rivers Network is a coalition that includes hundreds of local villages—including ones from far-flung areas of the country’s interior—as well as local nonprofit organizations.

It’s “unprecedented” for the indigenous people of Sarawak to work together on a political project of this kind, according to Brihannala Morgan.

Organizing in a Corrupt State

Every organizer contacted for this story mentioned the unique challenges posed by the regime of Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, who has ruled Sarawak since 1981. Environmental organizations have long considered his government to be corrupt, especially when it comes to the treatment of forests and land.

Herbertson adds that this work is not just about the dams, but about expanding the rights of Sarawak’s indigenous people more generally.

In 2011, a coalition of groups and individuals including Greenpeace and the Rainforest Information Centre, signed a letter to the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission calling for the arrest of Chief Minister Taib, eight of his siblings, and four of his children. The letter accuses Taib of “systematically and unduly favoring a number of family-linked companies by awarding them highly profitable untendered public contracts” and “hundreds of thousands of hectares of timber or plantation concessions.”

And it’s not just tree huggers who have a problem with Taib’s approach to the management of land in Sarawak. Wikileaks files reveal that representatives from the U.S. embassy in Malaysia wrote in 2006 that “Taib and his relatives are widely thought to extract a percentage from most major commercial contracts—including those for logging—awarded in the state.”

In March of 2013, the nonprofit group Global Witness posted a video on YouTube called “Inside Malaysia’s Shadow State,” in which researchers went undercover and posed as investors wishing to purchase land in Sarawak. With a hidden video camera, they captured representatives of Taib’s government appearing to suggest that the undercover researchers engage in bribery and tax evasion. The regime responded by saying that the comments were taken out of context.

Reaching Out to the Capital and Beyond

The revelations contained in the video came as no surprise to Peter Kallang, who has little faith in the local regime. So he turned to Malaysia’s federal government instead. While those efforts have resulted in no new policies or improved federal oversight, the campaign did manage to bind Sarawak’s indigenous people into a network capable of acting quickly to organize events like the one that took place on Wednesday.

In 2010, Kallang hand-delivered a memorandum about indigenous concerns about the SCORE dams to the Prime Minister of Malaysia, but says he received no response. In October of 2012, representatives of Save Rivers Network again traveled to Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia, to deliver a memorandum. Kallang says that members of the opposition party listened to his group’s concerns, while members of the ruling party ignored their invitations.

More recently, Kallang and other organizers with the network traveled by boat to the remote region where the Baram Dam is slated to be built. The Baram Dam is the second in the SCORE project and would require the resettlement of between 6,000 and 8,000 people, according to Sarawak Energy, the state-owned company that heads up the construction of dam projects in the state. The organizers visited every village that the dam would affect, informing the residents about the plan and collecting signatures from those who opposed the project. After adding those signatures to others he’d been gathering since 2010, Kallang says, he had 10,000 signatures from indigenous people opposed to the SCORE dams. He sent them to the federal government and again received no reply.

Kirk Herbertson, a lawyer who works with International Rivers, says that the funders of the project—which is expected to cost $105 billion by 2030—have been equally unresponsive to international criticism. Sarawak Energy has operated without transparency, Herbertson says, and has not made its environmental impact statements public before construction has begun. He says that criticism over the lack of transparency might be more of an obstacle if SCORE was being funded by multinational banks such as the World Bank or even Citigroup. “But there’s no real accountability for the investors that are investing in this,” Herbertson says, such as the Export-Import Bank of China.

Despite all of these challenges, Kallang says he remains hopeful. International firms who assist with the funding, design, and construction of the SCORE dams do not want to face accusations of involvement in violations of human rights, and Kallang has been more successful at working that angle. When an Australian company called Hydro Tasmania provided design assistance for the Baram Dam, members of the Save Rivers Network traveled to Canberra to speak to members of Parliament about it. Shortly after that trip, the company downsized its operations in Sarawak from 12 staff members to only four, Kallang says.

Herbertson adds that this work is not just about the dams, but about expanding the rights of Sarawak’s indigenous people more generally. He says the Save Rivers Network is important because “it’s helping to raise the profile, both locally and internationally, about what these people are facing.”

That sounds a lot like what the organizers of Idle No More have been saying since the North American movement for indigenous rights got started in November of 2012. Both movements begin with indignation about energy extraction projects that threaten to deprive indigenous people of their land and livelihood, but end with a vision of a more sustainable future in which native people are more connected to one another, more aware of their shared interests, and better equipped to stand up for themselves in the courts, in the media, and in the streets.

James Trimarco wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. James is web editor at YES!.