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Kapuas, Central Kalimantan. It was never going to be an easy choice for Siage E Saman to give up the only job he ever knew — felling trees — for something far less lucrative.

But for this local chief of Muara Mangkutup hamlet in Kapuas district, Central Kalimantan, the alternative was time behind bars.

Logging in this area took off in a big way in 1965. During this boom period, most hamlet residents were loggers, and there was an abundance of suitable trees — two meters in circumference or at least one cubic meter in volume — for which they could earn Rp 16,000 a day.

By 2001, they were making up to Rp 500,000 a day for some of the more valuable tree species.

This golden era of unfettered logging came to an end in 2003 with a government regulation outlawing the felling of more than five cubic meters of timber in a particular area.

“I was never arrested for illegal logging, but I gave up felling trees anyway,” says Siage, 52. “Besides, there’s no point chopping down trees anymore because there’s no demand for the timber. Why risk going to jail for nothing?”

He recalls the logging restriction as being particularly harsh on the local residents, citing the time one villager in neighboring Mentangai hamlet had to build a coffin from the walls of his own house when a relative died because the hamlet had used up its logging quota.

In Muara Mangkutup, residents have turned to agriculture, in particular rubber plantations.

Rubber farmer Suriato, 24, says most people chafe at having to eke out a living this way.

“A lot of the older people still hark back to those heady days of logging when they were pulling in Rp 500,000 a day,” he says. “So when they have to work on a plantation for just Rp 50,000 a day, the reality is bitter.

“But this is the only choice we’ve got,” he adds. “We either go against the law or we adapt, which in this case means rubber plantations.”

Siage, who has also become a rubber farmer, implements a harvest-sharing scheme with relatives who work for him.

“I usually take half the rubber [now worth Rp 5,500 a kilogram] and I give the rest to the workers in lieu of wages,” he says, adding the rubber is harvested from the trees, or tapped, three times a week.

Making money from rubber is also far more complicated than it was for timber, Siage adds. Farmers have to rely on brokers to buy their stock, and have less say in determining the price.

Some have tried planting rice or breeding fish, but much of the soil in the area is categorized as thin-layered peat, making it too acidic to grow rice.

As such, none of these efforts have proved anywhere near as profitable as logging.

So for the residents, a pilot project under the auspices of the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) program comes as a welcome relief.

In 2008, the Indonesia-Australia Forest Carbon Partnership (IAFCP) was established, whereby Australia pledged 30 million Australian dollars ($26 million) for the Kalimantan Forests and Climate Partnership (KFCP) demonstration activities and 10 million Australian dollars for other forest and climate-related programs.

Muara Mangkutup hamlet is one of 14 on the banks of the Kapuas River included in the initiative. The project encompasses 120,000 hectares of peatland earmarked in 1996 for the government’s ill-advised Mega Rice Project to plant one million hectares of paddy.

Wilistra Danny, the Indonesian coordinator for IAFCP, says the project aims to get residents to improve rubber plantations so they don’t fall back on logging, giving them the incentive of empowerment rather than money.

“The way they run their plantations now, they don’t get high-quality yields,” he says. “We’re trying to change that through the sharing of knowledge and technology.

“This is the incentive [from the REDD scheme]. We never give them money because we want to help them improve their own livelihoods so that they won’t ever have to cut down trees again.”

Wilistra says the primary objective of the KFCP is to prevent forest fires on peatland.

“The first thing we’re focusing on is how to bring back the peatland’s hydrologic function, which was badly damaged by draining in previous years,” he says.

Wilistra’s counterpart on the Australian side, Neil Scotland, says 400 dams will have to be built to block the water canals made during earlier efforts to drain the peatland.

“We’re in the process of getting an environmental impact analysis, which has been going on for more than a year, so we can build those dams,” Scotland says.

“The hardest part is the social impact, because people are accustomed to using the Kapuas River as their main transportation route. Most of the time they destroy the blocks we put up and even mark out areas as their own.”

Scotland says the badly damaged peatland will never recover but the dams will help retain water on the fringes of the forests.

“We’ll need to water these peat banks because these are the ones most accessible to humans and thus where most fires are started,” he says.

Scotland is adamant the project is not a carbon-trading scheme to offset Australian emissions.

“The next step once the pilot project ends is up to the Indonesian government, but we never intended to use it to get into carbon trading,” he says.

Hamlet chief Siage, meanwhile, says he doesn’t fully understand the REDD project.

“I don’t know all that much, but from what I’ve seen going on, they’re training the rubber farmers, which is fine because we depend on them now,” he says.