ZSL's Wildlife Ambassador - 17th of May 2010

In March, ZSL’s Berbak Carbon Initiative took its first wobbly steps into the world of VIP politics as part of our efforts to shore up high level support for our work in Jambi.

Following a courtesy visit by ZSL to the British Embassy in Jakarta in 2009, Ambassador Martin Hatfull uttered the fateful words ‘if there’s anything I can do to help’, thus setting in motion a chain of events that ended with him enduring an experience in Berbak he later cheerfully described as ‘definitely the most uncomfortable I have had in my career’ followed by a large scale invasion of his residence where he was forced to talk yet more about carbon.  But whilst we made a senior member of the British Foreign Office suffer, from the project’s perspective the British Embassy’s help was an unqualified success and we achieved all of our targets, namely:

1.      Get the project known by regional government

2.      Get the project known by senior Jakarta officials

3.      Introduce the project to Indonesia’s media

4.      Introduce the project to potential future investors

5.      Don’t drown the Ambassador (as this would largely cancel out the positive publicity gained in objectives 1-4)

The help that Ambassador Hatfull committed himself to was a brief visit to Jambi to help introduce our work to the provincial governor, a quick visit to the field to see the situation on the ground for himself and a final press conference to update local and national media on our work. This was then followed by an evening event at the Ambassadorial residence to which a number of senior government and private sector representatives were invited to watch an introductory video to the Berbak Initiative and listen to a brief overview of our work.

The field visit was initially planned as a quiet affair – Jakarta politics leaves little time for exploring Indonesia’s forests and this was going to be one of the Ambassador’s first opportunities to see a piece of ‘real’ jungle and a brief respite from being continually on show as Britain’s official representative. But as word of the visit spread it soon became clear that stuffing a senior civil servant into the back of the ZSL pick up and then floating him across river and sea on the ZSL barge (she rarely breaks down more than once per journey) was simply not the done thing and Jambi’s government stepped in. Thus when the time came to depart we threw our rucksacks not into 4x4s but into the spacious boots of a fleet of tinted window limousines in which we were whisked, complete with police escort, to the Batang Hari river and onto a pair of police launches which sped the Ambassador, the ZSL team, and an entourage of police and government officials into the forest.

I say sped…actually mechanical problems on one of the police boats meant we missed the tide window and got stranded at a coastal town for much of the day, eventually arriving in Berbak some two hours later than the ZSL barge would have made it in the original plan, but we won’t mention that for now. Besides, had we not been stranded the Ambassador would have missed the chance to sunbathe in front of the large crowd that gathered on Nipah Panjang harbour, and he may even have left under the illusion that fieldwork generally proceeds as planned.

Arriving in the forest that evening was probably the first time the Ambassador realized the sacrifice he was making for conservation. Now some 9 hours from the comfortable, if slightly pockmarked by cigarette burns, beds of Jambi’s hotels he surveyed our attempt at VIP treatment: a private room (ok, a cupboard – we don’t have private rooms), air conditioning (well, air in a rather hot and still condition), a bed (ok, a thin mattress, but most of us were on the floor) and, well, that was it. It may have been hot, stuffy, and infested by mosquitoes but at least he was going to see the brilliant night sky that is usually invisible from light-polluted Jakarta. At least he was going to drift off to near-sleep to the croaks and chirps of jungle nightlife, and be woken a matter of minutes later by the exultations of gibbons in the morning…. At least he was until our plans were dashed by police insistence that our generator and all the lights, usually just put on for a few hours each day, were left on all night for ‘security’ reasons, drowning out all noise but the very loudest snores and leaving those that could sleep to dream they had landed in the middle of some surreal, and very well lit, tractor show. Piracy, angry crowds and boat theft was all in a day’s work for our escorts – dark nights in tiger and crocodile infested jungle were obviously not! Even our plans for a cheeky jungle G&T went awry when I left half the ingredients on the police boat, never to be seen again.

But we weren’t there for luxury, we were there to see why Berbak was worth protecting, and the next morning the forest demonstrated this in a magical, misty display as we whisked the Ambassador away from half of the entourage and floated down river at dawn to the fading calls of secretive primates. The night’s aches and pains melted away as we watched ungainly hornbills clatter across the sky, bright broadbills and kingfishers dart from palm fronds and racket-tailed drongos swoop like paper aeroplanes back to their perch.  We saw crocodiles sink into the inky water as we approached and the ZSL field team pointed out the spot they saw a tiger swim across the river just a few weeks previous. We visited the large, open burnt areas where fires had ravaged a quarter of the park’s forest cover, we planted ceremonial trees to mark the visit and we visited the local coastal community where we were received like royalty and force fed a wide range of delicious sea-food. Two days later we arrived back at Jambi airport where the Ambassador, whose foreign office training evidently includes ‘how to keep white clothing look immaculate even when returning from the field’ presented many of these sights to the waiting press and described the project’s work in the context of global climate change and the UK government’s own commitments to address these issues, as well as their support of our project through the Darwin Initiative programme. There was some excitement, mainly from me, when one comment was mistranslated to say that the British government was donating several billion dollars to the project rather than to global efforts, but in the end we were satisfied with the widespread coverage and commitments of support the visit generated, commitments that were further backed up even by Indonesia’s Minister of Forestry at the event that followed in Jakarta.  We may have knackered the Ambassador’s back and made a substantial deposit of British blood to the mosquitoes and midges of Berbak, but thanks to our Embassy’s support, and to the kind reception of the Governor of Jambi and his government, the project took giant strides forward in March and it is now up to us to continue this momentum into the future.