10-year plan for forest reserve

Kota Kinabalu : The Sabah Forestry Department will formulate a 10-year forest management plan for the Gunung Rara forest reserve, located on Sabah’s east coast.

In a statement to announce the department’s assuming the direct management of the 51,245ha reserve, the department said it was part of an effort to place the area under Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) based on the Natural Forest Management (NFM) regime.

The first meeting of the project’s management committee for the area, chaired by department director Datuk Sam Mannan, was held in Sandakan recently.

“The management committee of the Gunung Rara SFM project will be headed by the department’s deputy director (development) Fidelis Edwin Bajau, with Sabah Foundation as a key member in the committee.

“This area is also part of the larger 261,264ha of United Nations Development Programme-Global Environment Facility (UNDP-GEF) project on ‘Biodiversity Conservation in Multiple-Use Forest Landscapes in Sabah’, and is a crucial wildlife corridor of global significance linking the world-renowned Danum Valley and the Maliau Basin Conservation Areas.”

The department added that appropriate forest management practices would be drawn up for the area to create a connectivity which was crucial for the viability of the wildlife corridor at the landscape level.

Source : New Straits Times