Te 2004 tsunami disaster wiped out close to two hundred thousand lives in Aceh. It illustrated well that Aceh, located at the Western tip of Indonesia, is extremely vulnerable to natural events. In the aftermath of this disaster and the three decade-long conflict for independence, I took office.
For Aceh’s sustainable development post reconstruction effort and the peace process to succeed, I launched the “sustainable economic development and investment strategy in Aceh” or “Aceh Green Vision”, to rebuild the economy for the Acehnese people, whilst at the same time preserving Aceh’s outstanding natural resources for the benefit of future generations.
We have already taken bold actions to implement the strategy. We declared a moratorium on logging, reviewed the status and condition of Aceh’s forests, and designed a new land use manage- ment plan. We created a specific institution, the Leuser Ecosystem Conservation Agency (BPKEL; Badan Pengelolaan Kawasan Ekosistem Leuser) to manage the vast forests of the Leuser ecosys- tem, home to more than three quarters of the remaining wild Sumatran orangutans. We are paying special attention to REDD (Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Land Degradation), and other ecosystem services as an economic opportunity resulting from the strategy.
Tese efforts will only be successful, however, if all stakeholders in Aceh work in the same direc- tion. In 2008, at the World Conservation Congress of IUCN, together with the Ministries of For- estry, the Environment, the Interior and Public Works, and the other 9 Provinces of Sumatra, we signed a bold declaration to protect the remaining forests and critical ecosystems of Sumatra. Te moratorium on logging constitutes a part of the government of Aceh’s strong commitment to the preservation of forest ecosystems in Aceh, which are the largest habitat for Sumatran orangutan.
For this very reason the report Orangutans and the Economics of Sustainable Forest Management in Sumatra is a key document. Aceh supports close to 80% of the total number of Sumatran orangu- tans in the wild. As an “umbrella” species, the Sumatran orangutan is an excellent indicator of the quality of its forest habitat. Te fate of the Sumatran orangutan in the wild is therefore intrinsically linked to our capacity to make the Aceh Green Vision and its strategy a practical reality, in other words, to implement genuinely sustainable local development.