The protection of forested coastal wetlands in Southern Sumatra: a regional strategy for integrating conservation and development

The coastal wetland ecosystems of South-east Asia are seriously threatened by increasing population pressure and by conversion to a range of uses from urban to forestry, agriculture and aquaculture. These ecosystems include mangroves, but also encompass coastal peatswamp forest and freshwater swamp forest. Solutions to the conservation problems require strategies which put individual areas into a regional and biogeographic context and address not only pressure within each area, but also attempt to solve the causes of these pressures. The coastal wetlands on the east coast of southern Sumatra provide an example of the types of problems that are widespread in the region. They are also of considerable ecological significance for their biodiversity and in regulating the ecological conditions of the productive inshore waters of the Java Sea. The Berbak National Park is perhaps the best representation of original peatswamp forest remaining in SE Asia, while the mangrove communities of Sembilang and associated rivers immediately to the south are of paramount value not only because they represent substantially intact natural communities, but also because they contain intact ecological gradients inland to palmswamp and peatswamp communities above the saltwater/freshwater interface. The three locations considered in this paper are of international importance as waterbird and wader habitat and Berbak is a Ramsar site. Nevertheless, human pressure is rapidly increasing. Intense pressure on the northern coastline of Jambi Province is driving a growing population along the coastal fringe adjacent to the Berbak National Park, while commercial forestry and a transmigration settlement to the south-west of Sembilang is also a source of increasing human activity. Extensive forest fires during the long dry season of 1994 resulted in widespread destruction of peatswamp forest on the borders of Sembilang and Berbak and allowed further encroachrnent to occur there. In this paper a set of proposals for conservation of the coastal wetland communities of southern Sumatra are presented. These proposals emphasize a range of land use approaches which contemporary conservation planning have available. They provide examples of local area multiple use and resource substitution techniques, zoning approaches, and potentially significant ecotourism opportunities. Taken together it is argued that these approaches are not only appropriate for site management, but will also relieve pressure associated with a continuing process of ad hoc and planned settlement and conversion which has characterized the region since the 1960s.