Feasibility Study On The Development Of Community Based Forest Management For Improving Watershed Management And Poor Households Welfare
Wednesday, 04 January 2012 04:26
brighten
Urgent problems in the Indonesian economy. Despite the good shape of economic development in Indonesia, the last five years have witnessed several urgent problems such as poverty, unemployment, and degraded quality of environment. During that period, when the global economy was hit severely several times, the Indonesian economy showed its strength and grew at the fluctuated rates ranging from approximately four to six percent per year. Nevertheless, the problem of poverty has been persistent. Poverty rates decreased insignificantly from 16% in 2004 only to 15% in 2009. Unemployment rates also decreased slightly from 9% in 2004 only to 8% in 2009. In addition, the quality of the environment has been degraded every year consistently. Areas of deforestation, degraded watershed, and critical land in general are getting larger. Consequently, natural disasters such as flood, landslide, droughts, and forest fires appear even more and more frequently in the national news.
Decentralization policy and regional autonomy. After the Soeharto Era ended in 1998, Indonesia entered into a new better political atmosphere that is usually named as the Reformation Era. This new era is characterized by efforts towards more democratization. Local governments, both in provincial level as well as in district level, were given more political powers. Except for few national policies such as defense, security, law, monetary, religion, and international relations, public administrations are almost fully controlled by regional (provincial and district) governments. It is natural to predict that such situation will easily cause the problems of coordination. This can raise very serious problems in the effort to improve quality of the environment. For example, two neighboring administrative regions can manage a system of watershed that covers areas of the two regions differently or even inconsistently. This fact hinders the efforts to conserve the environment effectively.
The importance of environment conservation, watershed management, and forestry development. Forests and watershed systems are not only sources of economic value added where many people rely their lives on, but more importantly they are also suppliers of services that guarantee the mechanical works of the ecosystem. Forests provide high economic value of commodities that can improve the welfare of the nation. Families (mostly poor ones) who live inside and surrounding forests rely their lives on forests resources. Any disruption to environmental resources such as forests or watershed systems in general can easily create not only economic problems of the local residents but also environmental problems in the global level. Unfortunately, solving economic problems alone is frequently insufficient, or even contradicts the efforts to solve environmental problems. Allowing people living inside and surrounding forests to utilize forest resources may help them improving their welfare but at the same time may endanger the sustainability of the forests. On the other hand, conserving the forests without considering the socio-economic aspects of the problem will not be effective. Holistic and comprehensive approaches are therefore needed to solve the problems.
Attachments:
 bi021 | 347 Kb | 43 Downloads |
