rehabilitation and ecosystem restoration. Research suggests that it would be strategically pertinent for the Indonesian government to commit to keep natural forest timber concessions in production alongside PA to collectively conserve its remaining forests, while providing income and employment. This could be accomplished by recategorising natural forest timber concessions as PA under the IUCN Protected Area Category VI (Brun et al., 2015). Such a permanent forest estate would provide advantages for biodiversity conservation and restoration while laying the foundation for further investment in sustainable forestry.
Image 4.1: Logged forests and cleared land for an oil palm plantation in Jambi, Indonesia Source: Flickr, photo by Iddy Farmer/CIFOR
4.3 Weakness of the Protected Areas Approach Notwithstanding the positive intent, outcomes of protected areas are not always as expected. When protected areas are appropriately located, well managed and enforced, positive outcomes are forthcoming. However, experience shows that this is not always the case. Verma et al. (2020) also noted a mismatch between KBA and allocation/coverage of PA. KBA in Sundaland are mainly situated in (biodiversity-rich) lowland forest. Yet many of the PA locations are in highland areas, leaving the biodiversity-rich lowland forests unprotected. Malaysia and Indonesia have 19.12% and 12.17% area coverage of terrestrial PAs respectively (WDPA Consortium, 2018), contributing to the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi Target 11, which set a global area based conservation target of 17% for terrestrial and inland waters and 10% for coastal and marine areas. However, based on the human footprint data and following deduction of areas under intense pressure, the actual protection may only be half and one-third of the official protection respectively for Malaysia and Indonesia. This is in line with findings by Jones et al. (2018) that about 30% of the area within global PAs is under intense human 59
