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Coal mining threatens the "Heart of Borneo" mongabay.com July 25, 2007
BHP Billiton, the world's largest mining company, plans to develop seven "forest mines" in the so-called "Heart of Borneo", an expanse of biodiverse rainforest on the tropical island that is home to orangutans and other endangered species. Documents obtained by the The Sunday Times suggest that the Australia-based mining firm has lobbied to have the protected status of some areas lifted so it can begin operations. Barry Gardiner, the recently appointed special representative on forestry for British prime minister Gordon Brown, said in Parliamentary testimony that despite pro-conservation overtones, BHP Billiton has pressed hard for mining in the biologically rich areas.
BHP Billiton: friend or foe to conservation?
"This is going to be a belt of mines right across rainforest. It will drive out wildlife and will be a disaster for the island," David Chivers, of the Wildlife Research Group at Cambridge University, told the The Sunday Times. "BHP Billiton is a climate dinosaur. A deluge of base camps, roads, and open-cast pits would eat the heart of this island from the inside out." Farah Sofa, deputy director of Indonesian environmental group Walhi, was quoted as saying. "The Heart of Borneo is a promising conservation initiative but these proposed coal mines are an inauspicous start," Dr. Francis Q. Brearley, a researcher from Manchester Metropolitan University who has worked in Central Borneo, told mongabay.com. "The forests in this area would have a much brighter future if they were to be maintained intact and economic value could be gained from the carbon stored within them" Still, argues environmental group WWF, conservationists may have better luck dealing with BHP Billiton, a large multinational that will face public scrutiny and international pressure on its operations, than smaller firms less concerned about their reputation. WWF says that should BHP Billiton pull out, less accountable companies may well move in, causing even more damage. Borneo's forests Since 1980 Borneo's forests have been reduced by more than one-third, mostly as the result of industrial logging, which later fueled large-scale fires (especially severe in the el Niño years of 1982-1983 and 1997-1998) and land conversion for oil palm plantations. WWF projects that by 2020 less than one third of Borneo's forest cover will remain, mostly in the central highlands of the island, while the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) says that 98 percent of orangutan habitat will disappear by 2022. Presently about two-thirds of Borneo's most biodiverse ecosystems, the lowland Dipterocarp forests, have been lost. Since 2000 Borneo has had the world's highest deforestation rate with annual forest loss approaching 4 percent per year. While the conservation community received positive news in February 2007 when the governments of Brunei, Malaysia, and Indonesia, working with WWF, agreed to protect roughly 220,000 square kilometers (85,000 square miles) of tropical forest in the so-called "Heart of Borneo", a prominent group of scientists from the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation say that the initiative does not do enough to safeguard the island's most biodiverse ecosystems: its lowland forests. Comments? News options
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