Restoring biodiversity in South-East Asia

The bare hillsides look forlorn and neglected due to erosion and degradation, but things are starting to change in Doi Mae Salong, an area in northern Thailand whose name translates as ‘mountain water’.

Taking a break from my research into revegetation programs and biodiversity in Australia, I am here to learn about the often overlooked restoration activities happening in South-East Asia, a region renowned for its floral, faunal and cultural diversity as well as its well-trodden backpacker paths.

In northern Thailand, revegetation is starting to take shape as an important way to support locals, once reliant on opium production for their livelihoods, to stabilise their hill country, make their agriculture more sustainable and provide habitat for native animals seldom seen since the land was cleared.

Land degradation in Doi Mae Salong started around the 1960s, when Burmese hill tribes and Chinese Kuomintang refugees moved into the unpopulated mountainous area. They started broad-scale deforestation in order to plant crops and undertake swidden or slash-and-burn agriculture. Over time the area became increasingly degraded, resulting in the eroded hillsides we see today, poor water quality, and a drop in rainfall.

Recently an unlikely alliance has formed between the Royal Thai Armed Forces and a non-government organisation, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), along with 13 local villages. Their aim is to stabilise the hillsides to reduce erosion and enhance water quality, while increasing biodiversity and sustaining local livelihoods through agroforestry.

The team is revegetating sites with an overstory of native trees and large shrubs to bring back wildlife and stabilise the soils. Within these plantings is a vibrant mixture of food plants for local agriculture such as macadamia nut, jack-fruit, eggplant, lychee, banana, plum and avocado. These food plants are managed by the local communities and used to supplement their income, along with ecotourism ventures and rice grown on terraced slopes.

Not far away, in the hills around Chiang Mai, another much more established revegetation project is being run by the Chiang Mai Universities Forest Restoration Research Unit (FORRU). Trained initially in northern Australia, the Thai team is now undertaking a research project to understand how best to establish revegetated areas that enhance biodiversity themselves.

I visited their long-term project site outside Chiang Mai, near a Hmong village called Mae Sa Mai. The project began 15 years ago when the villagers approached the University to help them restore their cleared and eroded hillsides and degraded water catchments. Since then, and with the help of the villagers, FORRU has been undertaking revegetation every year to test different strategies.

The 12-year-old multi-storeyed broadleaf forest I wander through is testament to the stunning success of the revegetation approach the team developed – a framework species technique. Using this technique, 20 to 30 species of seedlings that are fast growing, easy to propagate, fire resilient and that will provide good canopy cover are planted initially. These plants must also produce fruits and seeds that will attract birds and other animals into the restored areas.

These framework species plantings have been extremely successful in bringing back animals to the revegetated areas, which in turn bring in seeds for new plants that propagate and naturally diversify the replanted areas.

FORRU’s studies show that their oldest plantings have enjoyed a 66% increase in bird diversity and a staggering 75% increase in plant diversity. The project team is now training teams from China, Laos, Cambodia and Indonesia to start revegetation projects in their own countries.

Two books have been written and translated into many different languages to spread the knowledge about revegetating tropical wet forests. The next step for the team is to replicate the success in lowland deciduous forests, an initiative that has been going for about two years.

Revegetation and restoration projects on a much broader scale are also happening in the region, including the Biodiversity Conservation Corridors Initiative (BCI), managed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and implemented by partner organisations in five different countries in the South-East Asian region.

While the ADB’s primary aim is to increase economic growth and investment in the region, they also run projects such as the BCI in an attempt to mitigate some of the negative environmental impacts their development projects can have.

The BCI is being run alongside the ADB’s Economic Corridors for the Greater Mekong program, which is responsible for projects such as improving road infrastructure in northern Laos to increase trade between China, Thailand and Laos. However, conservation organisations report that these roads are dramatically increasing wildlife poaching and illegal logging in Laos’ national parks such as the Nam Ha Protected Area, through which a brand new highway cuts.

While the BCI’s corridors would help to offset these losses, my conversations with people on the ground show that there has been much debate about the success of the first phase of the initiative, and time will tell whether floral and faunal diversity can be saved through projects like this in the face of proposed economic development.

While this is just a snapshot of some of the projects I visited, it shows there are many inspiring and successful projects under way in South-East Asia, as well as others where economic gains may overshadow environmental stability.

In Australia much of our current ecological practice is based on research here or in Europe and America; however, I believe we can benefit from sharing the knowledge being developed in our immediate region, especially with regard to the importance of working alongside local communities to achieve lasting environmental and social outcomes.

Sacha Jellinek is a PhD Candidate in the School of Botany, University of Melbourne