The Stray World

Taib Mah­mud, Chief Mug­wump of Sarawak, and a mem­ber of the sub-committee of dwarf dic­tat­ors of Not Even Try­ing to Lie United, recently issued a chal­lenge for inde­pend­ent fact-checkers:

“I know that there are exag­ger­ated claims that 90% of Sarawak’s forests have been des­troyed by log­ging,” the chief min­is­ter said in an inter­view here in Kuch­ing, the cap­ital of the state of Sarawak. “These are prob­ably claims by people who are well mean­ing and care for the issue of defor­est­a­tion just like I do. But the fact is more than 70% of our forest are still intact.”

The Chief Min­is­ter noted that in addi­tion to the 70% of primary rain forest which remains intact in Sarawak, “another 14% of our sec­ond­ary jungle has been replanted and is under­go­ing plans for replant­ing. This is the simple fact and if people want to verify it, then they are wel­come to come to Sarawak.”

On the very same site, I found the fol­low­ing map:

It seems as if a 70% forest cover may be inac­cur­ate. Since I haven’t figured out how to cal­cu­late land cover by pixels, yet, I will just employ the fol­low­ing quote from the same report:

Although five types of nat­ural forest are recog­nized in Sarawak, three main types pre­dom­in­ate. These are Hill Mixed Dip­tero­carp Forest (cov­er­ing about 7 mil­lion hec­tares), Peat Swamp Forest (com­pris­ing about 1 mil­lion hec­tares) and Man­grove Forest (occupy­ing slightly more than 0.1 mil­lion hec­tares). The other two types, the Ker­an­gas and the Mont­ane Forests, are min­imal in size.

Observe that by admis­sion, they have already stated all nat­ural forest cover totals 8.1 mil­lion hec­tares or 8,100,000 hectares.

Sarawak’s total land area is 124,450 km².

1 hec­tare equals 10,000 m² which equals 0.01 km².

Divid­ing 124,450 by 0.01 equals 12445000 hectares.

Thus total forest nat­ural forest cover by offi­cial num­bers is 65%.

Just by simple arith­metic, I have shown the 70% fig­ure to be false, con­sid­er­ing that the total cover for Ker­an­gas and Mont­ane forests are neg­li­gible, it is a pretty good indic­a­tion that the pro­pa­ganda machine isn’t quite in ship-shape form.

Nev­er­the­less, a 5% dif­fer­ence is not fatal to the claim, but an actual satel­lite view of the land paints a bet­ter picture.

A curs­ory study was given by Mongabay.com.

I must note that the Mon­gabay report is not con­clus­ive, and fur­ther geo­graph­ical work of the data into a map that would allow a bet­ter con­trast of logged over with healthy forests is required.

A curs­ory inspec­tion does how­ever show that Sarawak’s forests that are neigh­bour­ing Brunei appear brighter than those in Brunei, a res­ult of increased reflect­ance from exposed areas devoid of rich can­opy cover.

The zoomed-in images also do not show the loc­a­tion at the bor­ders between Sarawak and Kali­mantan, and I fear the data may be biased into areas with dra­matic degradation.

A bet­ter way to present the data would be a pan­or­amic image of the entire bor­der between Sarawak and Kalimantan.

Then again, a bet­ter way to con­firm the data is to open Sarawak to ITTO inspect­ors, which appears to be out of the ques­tion for Taib.

Lukas Strau­mann of the Bruno Manser Fund, a group that has long advoc­ated on behalf of Sarawak’s forest people, expressed doubt that Taib would fol­low through on his pledge to allow inde­pend­ent exam­in­a­tion of Sarawak’s forests.

“Taib has never allowed any for­eign inspec­tion of Sarawak’s forests since the 1991 ITTO mis­sion which had not turned out the way he had hoped. In par­tic­u­lar, he has con­sist­ently refused ITTO to con­duct a follow-up mis­sion,” he told mongabay.com.

So why don’t we settle the issue of whether you are lying or not by allow­ing those inspect­ors in, eh old man?