​Protecting the Forests and Peatlands of Kalimantan ​

The Indonesia Women and Forests project in Kalimantan, Indonesia, is restoring degraded peatland ecosystems (some of the largest stores of carbon on Earth). Peatlands in Kalimantan are being rapidly destroyed by mass forest fires, palm oil plantation development, and sengon tree monoculture. This significantly impacts the global climate crisis and Kalimantan communities' health, livelihoods, and climate resilience.

This project is building a youth tree-growing campaign to train forest-dwelling communities in agroforestry to restore their livelihoods and protect forests and amplify communities' critical Indigenous knowledge in forest protection.

The 2022 project goals are to:

1. train 50 youth to be forest restoration and protection leaders by learning with Indigenous elders;
2. restore 6 hectares of burned peatland in a recently protected ecology area;
3. grow 10000 Indigenous trees in the protected area, and;
4. train the Talekoi community located next to the protected area in collaborative agroforestry to restore their livelihoods while protecting the restored forest.

Currently, this project is recruiting youth for training, refining the training plan with Indigenous elders in Talekoi village, growing Indigenous tree saplings for planting, and organizing the team for implementation.

Funding would close the current gap and allow the project to train an additional 20 leaders, restore three more hectares of degraded peatland, grow 5,000 more trees, and fully implement the agroforestry training objective with the Talekoi community to achieve the 2022 goals fully.

The Indonesia Women's Earth Alliance Grassroots Accelerator catalyzes the initiatives of Indonesian women leaders to protect their communities and ecosystems from environmental and climate threats like biodiversity loss, palm oil extraction, plastic pollution, and sea-level rise.

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