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WWF Efforts Yield Two New National Parks in Indonesia
Washington D.C. - WWF's partnership with the Indonesian government to protect the most biologically diverse forests in the world - the last remaining lowland forests on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra - have resulted in two national parks. A timber company agreed to retire its logging rights on some of the land that will be used for the parks, and research and advocacy by WWF field staff helped the government to create the parks, which are critical habitat for endangered elephants, tigers and orangutans.
The Indonesian government today announced the creation of Tesso Nilo National Park on Sumatra and Sebangau National Park on Borneo at the meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Malaysia.
A 2001 WWF study found that the forests in and around the new Tesso Nilo National Park have the highest vascular plant diversity per area ever recorded by science, with 218 species of plants identified in about a 2000 square feet area, about the square footage of the average American home, twice the plant diversity of the Amazon. Yet it was being clearcut at a rate that would have wiped out the forest in less than a decade.