GREENING THE ENVIRONMENT
MIRI: The Forest Department should collaborate with the private sector in ensuring that the Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) programme succeeds, said State Secretary Datuk Amar Jaul Samion.
For a start, private sector players can adopt degraded areas for restoration or finance efforts at greening the environment.
Jaul made the call at the Sarawak Forest Department’s (SFD) ‘Innovation Week and Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) programme’ held in Bakam Government Reserves here on Friday.
“We encourage aggressive participations from the private sectors namely Shell, Petronas, Samling, Interhill, Cahaya Mata Sarawak(CMS), Shin Yang Group of companies and Japan-Malaysia Association (JMA) to work hand-in -hand with SFD in ensuring the success of the FLR programme,” he said.
Jaul believed that with the aggressive participations from private sectors, it could help to increase State’s revenue from its forest products in the future.
“…and to enhance this programme further, we must not forget to strengthen our Research and Development (R&D) whereby we must carry out researches on forest restoration to identify site-species matching and to screen for rapidly growing trees,” he pointed out.
Jaul also emphasised the importance of getting the local community residing nearby the FLR areas to be involved in the programme.
“We want the local community to benefit from the programme,” he explained.
Bakam Government Reserves located at about 24km from Miri city can be reached via Miri Coastal Road within 30 minutes’ drive.
In conjunction with the event, the area was re-named ‘Jaul Restoration Model Area’ (JRMA)’.
“I am honoured with this recognition that the area is being renamed after me, thank you,” said Jaul.
At the programme, a total of 3,000 trees were planted in an area covering about 7.6 hectares of the 240 hectares forest reserve.
Also present were SFD director Datuk Hamden Mohammad, deputy director Jack Liam and acting deputy Resident Miri Division, Mohd Abdul Aziz Mohamad Yusuf.
