Bersama Lestarikan Nusantara Foundation (“Yayasan Belantara”) is an Indonesian non-governmental organization launched in 2015 with the goal of supporting government to conduct conservation efforts on a broad scale while improving the communities' livelihood. It takes its name from the Indonesian word ‘Belantara’ which means wilderness or pristine forest.
We work to protect the Indonesian landscape by implementing local projects in areas that are set aside for conservation, reforestation and sustainable community development.
Belantara’s primary focus is to support restoration, protection, conservation of endangered species (specifically Sumatran Tiger, Sumatran Elephant, as well as Sumatran and Bornean Orangutan), institutional development, and community development and empowerment initiatives in conservation areas, production forests, protection forests, and social forestry in the ten specified grant distribution areas across five provinces on the islands of Sumatra and Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo).
Working with local communities, governments, the private sector and NGOs, Belantara relies on a multi-stakeholder approach to better inform decision-making when addressing resource management problems. With the Essential Ecosystem Areas (KEE) stretching across the grant distribution areas, a coordinated response between all stakeholders for the effective management and preservation of critical ecosystems is required.
As an independent foundation, Belantara aims to work with all parties that share its goals, coordinating and collaborating with partners within each of its ten specified grant distribution areas. Belantara aims to ensure that existing initiatives are aligned, minimizing the risk of projects overlapping while maximizing information and data sharing.
Belantara is actively working with both the public and private sector to raise additional resources and is working with partners to develop a range of financial instruments with the aim of derisking investment in landscape conservation in order to catalyze further deployment of capital.
Fundamentally, Belantara fully supports the focus and priority initiatives of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry of the Government of Indonesia. To be specific, Belantara supports the development of large-scale ecosystem conservation in Sumatra and Kalimantan. To that end, Belantara’s Guideline was created in 2014. A consortium of private sector groups, governments and NGO stakeholders was involved in its development process. The main objective of the document is to align conservation activities carried out by multiple stakeholders. It is a multi-stakeholder action plan that serves as a supporting guideline for partner groups implementing projects within the specified grant distribution areas. This creates an enabling environment for building consensus and capacity among stakeholders, ensuring that the initiatives in the ecosystem collectively support an environmentally, socially, culturally, and economically sustainable ecosystem.
Belantara’s Guideline promotes the multi-stakeholder approach for a sustainable ecosystem management, identifies ten specified grant distribution areas based on a designed set of criteria, and outlines a number of activities and programs in support of ecosystem strategies relevant to the ecosystems.
