Oil palm plantations can be a significant contributor to rural livelihoods in Indonesia. The government seeks to capitalize on this commodity and strengthen Indonesia’s position as the global leader in palm oil production by expanding plantation estates. As the land for new plantation investment in Kalimantan and Sumatra becomes scarce, plantation developers are looking east to acquire land in Papua Province. The rising interest in oil palm plantations in Papua presents potential opportunities but also poses challenges.
Drawing on research findings from Boven Digoel District, one of the key areas for oil palm expansion in Papua, this paper illustrates the dilemma of plantation development in the region by examining the social, economic and environmental impacts.
Plantation development in Boven Digoel District has opened up isolated areas, stimulated the development of infrastructure, generated employment and improved worker incomes. However, the indigenous communities’ reliance on forests for subsistence and their lack of familiarity with oil palm as a cash crop has proven to be a major barrier to effective engagement of the local population. In addition, the decision by the company not to implement an outgrower scheme has led to limited community involvement, rising tensions about land acquisition processes and resentment about low compensation payments.
The development of oil palm plantations has also resulted in deforestation and other negative environmental impacts, such as poor water quality, air pollution and soil erosion. Reducing environmental damage and creating better conditions for the productive engagement of local communities are major challenges for plantation investment in forested frontier regions such as Papua.
Tag: citizen participation
Crowdsourced Water Level Monitoring in Kenya’s Sondu-Miriu Basin—Who Is “The Crowd”?
Citizen science is gaining popularity as a way to engage people to participate in environmental projects. In addition to potential challenges regarding data quality and the choice of variables, a key factor in the success of participatory monitoring projects is the active participation of volunteers, the “citizen scientists.” To learn more about the motivation of citizen scientists to participate and their socio-economic background, a telephone survey was implemented with participants of a citizen science water level monitoring program in the Sondu-Miriu basin, western Kenya. We analyzed the data using descriptive statistics and random forest models to elucidate the characteristics of the participant population, underlying motivations, and the challenges and opportunities to develop recommendations for sustainable community-based water monitoring programs. As citizen scientists who engaged long-term were 30–49 years old, had primary or secondary school education and passed by the monitoring station frequently, targeting sensitization activities at people with such background could increase participation in community-based water monitoring. Sensitization meetings were key in engaging long-term volunteers, but participants indicated that continued feedback through education and communication of the project findings is required to keep volunteers motivated. The use of cellphone credit to submit data was identified as challenge for participation, highlighting the need for data submission methods that do not incur costs for the participants. Greater volunteer support could also be achieved by active involvement of the members of Water Resource Users Associations, since membership increased the likelihood of continuous engagement in water monitoring under the participants. Furthermore, many participants indicated that their motivation was to help water management and conservation, as most people rely directly on rivers for their water supply. Providing a platform to contribute to better water resources management could therefore result in direct benefits (e.g., improved water supply) for the participants, and thus an incentive to participate actively.
Monitoring of Suspended Sediments in a Tropical Forested Landscape With Citizen Science
Catchments are complex systems, which require regular monitoring of hydro-chemical parameters in space and time to provide comprehensive datasets. These are needed to characterize catchment behavior on a local level, make future projections based on models, implement mitigation measures and meet policy targets. However, many developing countries lack a good infrastructure for hydrological monitoring since its establishment is costly and the required resources are often not available. To overcome such challenges in data scarce regions like Kenya, a participatory citizen science approach can be a promising strategy for monitoring water resources. This study evaluates the potential of using a contributory citizen science approach to explore spatiotemporal turbidity and suspended sediment dynamics in the Sondu-Miriu river basin, western Kenya. A group of 19 citizen scientists was trained to monitor turbidity using turbidity tubes and water levels with water level gauges in six nested subcatchments of the Sondu-Miriu river basin. Over the course of the project, a total of 37 citizen scientists participated and contributed to the overall dataset of turbidity. The sampling effort and data contribution varied from year to year and among participants with the majority of the data (72%) originating from 8 (22%) citizen scientists. Comparison between citizen-scientist collected suspended sediment data and measurements from automated stations showed high correlation (R2 > 0.9) which demonstrates that data collected by citizen scientists can be comparable to data collected using expensive monitoring equipment. However, there was reduced precision of the measurements of suspended sediment concentrations at low and high levels attributed largely to the detection limitations of the turbidity tubes and citizen scientists not capturing major sediment export events. Suspended sediment concentrations were significantly higher downstream (109 ± 94 mg L−1), a subcatchment dominated by agriculture and rangeland with low forest vegetation cover, as compared to a subcatchment with high forest cover (50 ± 24.7 mg L−1). This finding indicates that forest cover is a key landscape feature to control suspended sediment concentrations in the region. Future citizen science projects should focus on motivation and engagement strategies and the application of robust methods with improved detection limits and resolution to advance hydrological monitoring.