Walking briskly barefoot under the dense canopy of tropical rainforest on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, Said Tolao showed no signs of slowing down despite his 76 years.
Tolao, of the Ngata Toro Indigenous community, has been a forest guard for more than half a century, patrolling from dawn till dusk and reporting illegal logging and farming to his Indigenous Council, which can then issue heavy fines.
Stopping by a giant moss-covered rock near the Lore Lindu National Park in Central Sulawesi, Tolau pointed to patches of newly logged farmland on a steep hill.
“Farming on a steep slope is prohibited here,” said Tolao, “It will only cause erosion and landslides and it will bring doom to all of us.”
With almost 700 families, the Ngata Toro people live in a valley surrounded by mountains and forest, most of which is now part of the Lore Lindu National Park, established by the government in 1982 following recognition from UNESCO.
The national park encompasses more than 300,000 hectares of forest, leaving 18,000 hectares to the Ngata Toro Indigenous community.
The forest is an important ecosystem for animals and plants like tarsius, babirusas, hornbills and various orchids that has provided for the Ngata Toro people for generations.
Indonesia is one of the world’s most biodiverse countries and has the world’s third biggest area of rainforest after Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The United Nations estimates Indonesia’s trees store nearly 300 billion metric tons of carbon.
The Ngata Toro community opposed the national park’s designation as it threatened their customary ways of life, said Rukmini Paata Toheke a 54-year-old Ngata Toro elder.
Now the community wants to play a larger role in protecting traditional lands from rising threats like illegal farming and mining.
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We’ve been practicing this method of farming and exploitation for generations. And we managed to keep the forest intact, long before the government came here.
Andreas Lagimpu, elder, Ngata Toro Indigenous Council
The province of Central Sulawesi lost more than 140,000 hectares of forest between 2013 and 2022 due to mining and farming, the National Statistics Agency said.
“We do not differentiate the forest whether it belong to us or not, because we’ve been protecting it for centuries,” Toheke said.
An indigenous role in conservation
The Indonesia government has for decades aimed to conserve biodiversity by designating important ecosystems as national parks, nature reserves and protected forests.
However, this strategy has often overlapped with Indigenous communities’ territories, and protected areas still suffer from deforestation and extractive industries like mining.
Lore Lindu National Park Director Titik Wurdiningsih said park rangers and law enforcement agents had discovered one illegal gold mine that covered almost one hectare in Central Sulawesi, one of seven such sites found in 2023.
“The pressing and urgent issue is how to deal with illegal gold mining,” she said.
Guarding such a vast national park is challenging, said Wurdiningsih, with only 18 forest rangers in almost 300,000 hectares, well short of around 45 she believes are needed.
The national park relies on local communities to report crimes, said Wurdiningsih, but the park lacks a legal framework to involve Indigenous people in forest protection outside the customary forests where they have official recognition.
After years of peaceful protests, it was not until 2018 that the Ngata Toro were granted official recognition from the regional government, guaranteeing legal protection and access to customary land and to preserve their local wisdom.
In 1995, the community filed a request to the Ministry of Environment and Forestry to take back 9,000 hectares from the Lore Lindu National Park, but only 1,747 hectares of forests were handed over in 2021 through a ministerial decree.
The Ngata Toro are still campaigning for the return of the other 7,300 hectares.
During the United Nations COP16 conference on nature and biodiversity in Cali, Colombia in November last year, 170 delegations, including Indonesia, agreed on an expanded role for Indigenous peoples to protect biodiversity.
But in order to implement the agreement in Indonesia, the government must pass a long-awaited Indigenous Peoples bill that would grant legal protection for Indigenous peoples for their involvement in conservation, said Julianti.
In Lore Lindu, the centuries-old practices of the Ngata Toro could provide a model for sustainable land management and protecting nature, said Andreas Lagimpu, a 70-year-old elder who sits on the Ngata Toro Indigenous Council.
The Ngata Toro Indigenous community farms the region sustainably by dividing the land into several zones, prohibiting exploitation and farming, apart from in secondary forests or less steep foothills.
The Ngata Toro also impose moratoriums on certain commodities to give trees the time to regrow and encourage crop diversification. For example, this year is the fifth of an eight-year moratorium on growing rattan.
“We’ve been practicing this method of farming and exploitation for generations,” said Lagimpu.
“And we managed to keep the forest intact, long before the government came here,” he said.
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