Tag: Baram Peace Park

The Baram Peace Park (Taman Damai Baram) is a community initiative designed to protect Sarawak’s last remaining primary forests, celebrate local cultures, and develop sustainable livelihoods. The vision for the park is spearheaded by communities in the upper reach of the Baram River in northern Sarawak, who have spent decades resisting logging in their ancestral lands while building an alternative vision for their forests and their futures.

Background

The concept of the Baram Peace Park originated in 2009 among Penan villages in the Upper Baram, initially known as the Penan Peace Park. This initiative arose in response to the constant encroachment of logging companies into the forest. The Penan communities envisioned the park as a means to integrate ecological and cultural conservation with economic advancement. Central to the Peace Park is the principle of self-determination, ensuring the protection of Indigenous rights — particularly the right to land.

In 2015, the late Chief Minister Adenan Satem welcomed the project and recommended expanding it to include all communities in the area — Penan, Saban, Kelabit, and Kenyah — into what was renamed the Baram Peace Park.

Conservation Significance

The Baram Peace Park encompasses 283,000 hectares of forests and farmlands in the Upper Baram, including a 79,000-hectare core zone of intact primary rainforest — the largest stretch of primary forest in Sarawak outside of a national park. Four Indigenous groups — the Penan, Kenyah, Saban, and Kelabit — inhabit 32 villages within the proposed protected area.

A survey conducted by ITTO in the adjacent Pulong Tau National Park indicates that the area represents a biological hotspot, with at least 819 plant species, 315 bird species, 20 large mammal species, 84 fish species, 34 amphibian species, and 75 taxa of aquatic insects recorded in the region.

Current Status

In November 2020, the Baram Peace Park project was formally adopted by the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) and the Sarawak government, under the name “Upper Baram Forest Area (UBFA).” The project was publicly presented as a model of collaborative conservation between the state and Indigenous communities, with funding from the Japanese government, the City of Basel, the Bruno Manser Fonds, and the Malaysian government. It was formally launched in March 2023.

What followed was a betrayal of that promise. While the project was being developed, the Sarawak government quietly issued a new timber license to Borneoland Timber Resources Sdn. Bhd. — a previously unknown company — over more than 100,000 hectares of the proposed conservation area, without public tender, community consultation, or Free, Prior, and Informed Consent. Logging began in the core protection zone in 2024. In October of that year, the Sarawak Forest Department unilaterally cancelled the UBFA project.

The ecological and human consequences have been severe. Community monitors estimate that more than 5,000 tons of timber are leaving the concession every month, cut from previously undisturbed primary rainforest. Rivers have silted. Wildlife habitats have been destroyed. Communities that built this vision over decades are now watching their forests fall.

In August 2026, our partners at Bruno Manser Fonds, Keruan, JATAN, and Friends of the Earth Japan published Plundering the Baram Peace Park — a report documenting how this happened, the actors responsible, and what must now be done. Read the full report below.