Press Release: New Study Finds Community-Led Health and Livelihood Programs Helped Protect West Kalimantan's Rainforests During COVID-19

PONTIANAK, Indonesia - A new study published in The Lancet Planetary Health found that villages where communities had already co-designed health and livelihood programs with local nongovernment organizations, including Alam Sehat Lestari (ASRI), Health In Harmony, and Yayasan Planet Indonesia, experienced significantly lower forest loss during the COVID-19 pandemic than neighboring villages without those partnerships.  

The study combined more than 1,000 household surveys with satellite monitoring of forest loss across 726 villages in West Kalimantan, comparing villages with and without these community-led programs. Across the region, forest loss declined by an average of 39% after the pandemic was declared in March 2020, a striking contrast to increases in rainforest loss recorded in Brazil and Ecuador over the same period.

The contrast became even stronger during the pandemic.  Before the pandemic, villages with co-designed NGO-affiliated programs already had 52% lower rates of forest loss than unaffiliated villages. As the pandemic hit and economic pressure on rural households intensified, that gap widened to 68%.

Lead author Skylar Hopkins, Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University, explained that forest loss in these partner communities was already declining before the pandemic, as households there depended less on illegal logging for cash income. Given that pattern, the team expected COVID-19's economic hardship to push logging back up, the opposite of what the data showed.

Iwi Sartika, Program Manager at Yayasan Planet Indonesia, pointed to coastal fishing communities as an example of the pandemic's economic impacts: "Coastal communities were heavily impacted by the global fisheries crash." Fuel costs for boats rose just as fish prices collapsed.

Nearly every household in the study reported the pandemic as a major economic shock; about half lost income or a job, faced rising costs for basic goods, or both. Despite the economic disruption, direct health impacts were relatively limited: only 2% of households pointed to illness or health spending as a major challenge, according to Sakib Burza, Chief of Health and Innovation at Health In Harmony.

Communities with co-designed and NGO-affiliated support also had more sources of external help to draw on during the pandemic, such as community loan programs. Nur Febriani, Director of Partnerships at ASRI, pointed to one specific example: many community members struggled with rising costs of pesticides and fertilizers, but less so in villages where communities had already established organic farming training programs.

The study also found that broader conditions during the period reduced pressure on forests generally. Ashley Hazel of UC San Francisco, the study's lead social scientist, pointed to strict travel restrictions and heavy rainfall in 2020 and 2021, which made steep rainforest terrain harder to access. The global timber market crash in early 2020, which reduced the financial incentive to log in the first place, was a factor that shaped outcomes in unaffiliated villages too.

Senior author Giulio De Leo, Professor at Stanford University, said the findings extend beyond COVID-19. The pandemic was one example of the kinds of disruptions communities face. Investing in health and livelihood systems that communities design themselves, he said, strengthens resilience for both people and ecosystems.

More than 20 researchers from the United States and Indonesia contributed to the study, representing North Carolina State University, Stanford University, UC San Francisco, IPB University, UC Santa Barbara, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, alongside practitioners from Yayasan Planet Indonesia, Alam Sehat Lestari (ASRI), and Health In Harmony. The research was supported by the Packard Foundation (grant #2020-70906) and the National Geographic Society (grant NGS-91292R-21).

The full paper, "Pandemic impacts on protected rainforests and rural communities with variable health and livelihood support in West Kalimantan: a mixed-methods approach combining household surveys and remote sensing," is published in The Lancet Planetary Health: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(26)00028-8/fulltext

Media Contact:
Aurore Maxey
Communications Officer
aurore@planetindonesia.org