Published on: Thursday, December 18, 2003 |
Tambunan: Public participation is the approach taken by Sabah Parks in finalising the management plan for Sabahs largest park - the 139,191 hectare Crocker Range.
Over a hundred people including the District Officers of Keningau, Tambunan, Penampang, Papar, Beaufort, Tenom , Tuaran, village heads and Village, Security and Development committee members of Kg Terian, Longogungan and Buayan assembled at the Tambunan Village Resort for a two-day Workshop on Sociological Issues In and Around Crocker Range to thrash out issues pertaining to land, villages, natural resources , water and the environment.
Gazetted in 1984 principally as a watershed for the West Coast, the question of protecting this mammoth 139,191-hectare park is by no means settled.
Under the Parks Enactment, the park is strictly for protection where nobody is allowed to develop, use, fish, hunt, build housing, without the consent of the Park authorities.
However, villages such as Kionob already existed within its boundaries when it was gazetted. Many other villages are either partially lodged within its boundaries or just outside and villagers had continued to use the park for livelihood purposes.
These include potentially damaging purposes such as shifting cultivation, hunting where targets include protected species and gathering of rare orchids.
And in nearly all the villages, there are big requests for land even up to 200 acres per application.
But the biggest issue is probably traditional resource use, native customary rights versus modern law, such as the Land Ordinance, Forest Enactment, Parks Enactment for watershed versus traditional resource use.
In drafting the Crocker Range Management Plan as one of the components of the JICA-assisted Bornean Biodiversity and Ecosystem Conservation (BBEC) Programme, we have taken a participatory approach to take into consideration the opinions and interests of the people inside the park, said its Director, Datuk Lamri Ali, Wednesday.
Lamri stressed that since the Crocker Range Park currently supplies the water needs of about 1.2 million people in eight districts, including Kota Kinabalu, Sabah Parks will be taking the views of people of the eight districts as well.
All the views will be recorded as a guideline for making the plan, he said.
Lamri said Sabah Parks takes a long term view of managing the water issue when many more million people in Sabah will run to the Crocker Range for water.
As such, requests deemed damaging to future water security of the population at large are not likely to get a hearing.
The workshop include seven papers and group discussion sessions to establish mutual understanding on best practices of natural resource use versus nature conservation, to build consensus on legal justification, institutional coordination and possible solution among stakeholders, workable collaboration and future action plans.
Noting how over a million people in Sabah now depend on its ecological services and products such as life-sustaining water, JICA Chief Advisor, Takahisa Kusano, said damaging its healthy natural characteristics will lesson the benefits and create social and economic problems.
Therefore, the participation of local communities and residents in planning ad management is essential and indispensable, Kusano said.
