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Five years after the SDGs were adopted and just when the United Nations called for realising the Decade of Action, the COVID-19 pandemic halted the progress of the SDGs and even reversed some of the achievements that the world made over years. With most countries struggling to overcome the pandemic and revive the economy, losing the focus on the...

Rapid development in Bintulu has resulted in large-scale changes in land use, especially the conversion of forests into oil palm plantations and industrial tree plantations. Using high-resolution satellite imagery, we analysed land-cover types in the Kemena–Tubau–Lower Jelalong region of Sebauh subdistrict and classified them into nine major land...

This chapter discusses the historical formation and current features of society in the Kemena and Tatau river basins in Bintulu, central Sarawak, where various ethnic groups live close together in a small area as a result of the historical migration of each group. We refer to previous studies and to interviews we conducted, mainly in 2011...

While Borneo is a global biodiversity hotspot, its species-rich natural rainforests have been degraded and deforested in the past few decades by unsustainable shifting agriculture, commercial logging and the rapid development of industrial tree and oil palm plantations. Populations of some wildlife species have decreased drastically due to...

The island of Borneo is regarded as one of the most biologically rich regions in the world, containing some of the oldest remaining tropical rainforests. However, it also suffers high levels of deforestation and degradation to meet the demands for timber extraction and agricultural activities. In Sarawak, areas designated as permanent forests...

It is important to understand carbon (C) dynamics in terrestrial and coastal ecosystems in order to develop a strategy to control carbon dioxide effluxes. However, the factors determining concentrations of riverine carbon are still largely unknown, especially in Southeast Asia. We investigated the spatial distribution of dissolved and particulate...

With rapid deforestation and forest degradation ongoing in tropical regions, the maintenance of biodiversity and high biomass/carbon stocks can bring additional benefits to the sustainable management of natural forests along with sustainable timber production. However, the measures for improving the maintenance of biodiversity and high biomass are...

The drastic transformation in land use from natural forest to acacia and oil palm plantations in tropical regions is an issue of some controversy. The influence of land-use change on nutrient cycling is not fully understood. In this case, stream water chemistry is one of the most useful indexes of the nutrient status of an ecosystem. We...

Over the last few decades, the landscape of Borneo has drastically changed from primary forests to a mosaic of secondary forests and crop plantations, and more recently to the monocultures of single crop plantations. At the same time, livelihoods have become more linked to urban economies. To evaluate the effects of these changes on hunting...

In the traditional agricultural land-use pattern of the indigenous peoples of inland Sarawak, there are small areas of primary forests, referred to as a pulau or communally reserved forests (CRFs), which are customarily reserved by local communities. Here, we investigate the current condition and geographic distribution of CRFs in the human...