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Farwiza Farhan speaks about saving the Leuser Ecosystem at a Global Tipping Points Conference 2026. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 28 2026 (IPS)

Forty-year-old Farwiza Farhan’s eyes light up instantly when she talks about the Leuser Ecosystem – a national strategic area encompassing a national park, a wildlife reserve, protected forests and other land uses.

“It’s rare to have such a large landscape remain intact despite continuous encroachment by developers, which is shrinking the habitat of the tiger, the elephant, the rhino and the orangutan,” she says. At 2.7 million hectares, Leuser remains a rare stronghold for wildlife in a country where many forests have been decimated. “Leuser still stands, and the wildlife thrives there,” she says with a certain pride. “This is why the landscape is so incredibly special,” she says.

Farhan, a Sumatran forest conservator who heads Forest, Nature & Empowerment Aceh (HAkA), spoke to IPS on the sidelines of the Global Tipping Points Conference 2026, held at Sunway University, Kuala Lumpur, from October 12 to15. HAkA works to protect and restore the Leuser through conservation campaigns and meaningful community participation.

“If we don’t pay heed, we will push these animals closer to extinction,” she warned. “There are fewer than 250 tigers and maybe just 100 rhinos left.”

Corporations are shrinking wildlife habitats, says Farhan, pointing to large-scale gold mining and palm oil plantations, some spanning up to 10,000 hectares. “They’re located next to one another and compete for more space than anyone could ever,” she explained.

But wildlife is not the only thing losing space. According to Farhan, 500,000 people live within the ecosystem, and five million live outside it. Their lives are closely tied to the forest, which they use sparingly – consuming what they grow, unlike mining companies and corporations that extract resources on a large scale.

“Many concessions are located near towns and transport routes, making it easier to move commodities. But when forests are cleared, downstream communities bear the consequences, while upstream communities lose access to their land. Palm oil companies often take over land outside protected areas and push the communities living there further away,” said Farhan.

The costs of forest destruction, however, extend beyond the loss of wildlife. Women in communities that depend on the forest often bear a disproportionate burden.

“They are not scared of big multinational companies; they are truly militant in the way they respond to corporations they know will take away their land and forests. They feel the companies will slowly destroy their lives, so they might as well die fighting to stop them from bulldozing their village,” she said.

Farhan saw how women responded when disaster struck last year.

“Disasters force people to relocate, and that’s when women face immediate security concerns. In crowded camps, they may lack safe access to water and sanitation, and their privacy is often compromised. Yet they continue to shoulder the bulk of care work — looking after children and the elderly — while often losing their livelihoods and income.”

She says she has “massive respect and appreciation” for these women.

Sadly, these same women, who have a deep connection with the forest, are often excluded from policy-making forums where their voices matter most, she said.

Orangutan and infant. Credit: Anton Leddin/Wikimedia

She witnessed their knowledge and role in decision-making during Aceh’s catastrophic floods and landslides last November, triggered by torrential rains. “They understood local realities and were the first to mobilise and respond,” she pointed out.

And while many people see women huddled together as gossiping, Farhan playfully calls it “stakeholder mapping”.

“They know who’s doing what, which community members have betrayed them by taking bribes from corporations, and they know exactly what to do when that happens. Elderly women are the best: they have wisdom and respect, and they’ve seen it all before. They are the ones who hold the fort for their communities. Sometimes, an elderly woman will approach a young man engaged in illegal logging and ask, ‘Whose son are you?’ The question carries enormous weight.”

Working with communities has humbled Farhan.

“Our education taught us to speak in certain way, but not to listen. I think we need to invest more time in really listening to communities. We feel that because we are educated, we are there to educate, but in reality, the local people know and understand their problems and have the solutions.”

Spending a day alone in a village was all it took for her to realise how out of her depth she was. “Being left alone in the forest made me realise how quickly I could get lost without appropriate tools.”

Although her ancestry is Acehnese, she is uncomfortable identifying herself as indigenous because she and her family have not experienced the discrimination and lack of opportunities faced by indigenous communities.

“I can’t say that I shared those experiences directly,” she says, acknowledging that her education has given her privileges others have not had. “Identity-wise, I’m confused.”

Yet, she says, she understands their struggle and stands with them. However, she would not use that ‘Indigeneity’ card to gain access to funding and opportunities meant to expand opportunities for Indigenous peoples, as it is “unfair to the people who are actually going through the struggles and working hard to get the opportunities.”

A marine biologist by qualification, she also enrolled in a PhD programme in anthropology, which she later gave up. “I built the organisation while I was doing my PhD, but it died in the process,” she admits. “The work to protect forests was a lot more interesting,” she says with a smile.

But forests were not always her focus. By her own admission, her initial motivation was to protect the ocean because of her love for the underwater world.

Her degree in marine biology helped her understand ocean ecosystems better. She returned to the place where she had first fallen in love with the ocean, only to find it destroyed.

“In 2007, in a remote part of Aceh, Pulau Weh, I saw for the first time how El Niño had devastated an entire coral reef. I felt powerless,” she recalls. Realising how little she could do as an individual, she turned her attention to the forests. “Maybe protecting forests would be easier,” she thought.

But that was easier said than done. When she was hired to work for the government’s forest agency and the Leuser Ecosystem Management Authority, she accepted the offer without asking about the salary or her job description.

“I just wanted to work in conservation. I thought I’d be running around under the canopy of trees, going on patrol and watching wildlife. It turned out to be anything but that. I was stuck behind a desk with a computer in front!”

The job turned out to be in public relations. She was the spokesperson but rarely got the opportunity to speak.

“It was a very confusing place; I got sent to meetings to speak about forest allocations, spatial planning, environmental impact assessments…things I did not learn at university, things I was not equipped to deal with.”

Fate had other plans. All these experiences helped her understand power imbalances and conflicting interests. She also saw firsthand how people tasked with protecting forests could end up destroying them.

She stayed on until the government agency was shut down after its efforts to stop powerful interests from destroying forests met with opposition. She then joined her “stubborn and persistent” colleagues to help find HAkA.

She recalls countless half cups of coffee at cafés, bought because they could barely afford more, as they used the cafés’ Wi-Fi to brainstorm.

“We were not going to give up on protecting the Leuser ecosystem,” she said.

In 2011, Farhan and her organisation were among the environmental campaigners who challenged the government in court over its decision to grant concession to a palm oil company, in Aceh’s Rawa Tripa peat swamp forest (also in Leuser), despite a two-year nationwide moratorium on new concessions having been imposed three months earlier.

PT Kallista Alam, the company, pursued a series of appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court. In 2013, the apex court rejected the appeal and ruled in favour of the community. Yet it took until 2015 for the company’s USD 26.5 million fine to be upheld, and a decade for the company to pay the fine for the environmental damage caused by using fire to clear ten square kilometres of land.

“The company has paid part of the fine to the Ministry of Finance but not to the community,” said Farhan, a campaigner who witnessed the fire.

But she added many actors contributed to the victory, including people who trained judges and attorneys to better understand what it meant to quantify environmental loss in economic terms.

“Judges don’t come from biology or ecology backgrounds,” she said, explaining that judges in Indonesia undergo environmental training to understand that burning forests and replacing them with monoculture plantations is not reforestation.

Farhan’s work is far from over. As long as the extractive economy persists, the threats will remain. If it isn’t palm oil plantations, it will be gold mining or attempts to redraw boundaries.

Her organisation challenges these threats through legal action, spatial planning and, at times, by helping the government evaluate permits across districts and landscapes.

“There are times when government decisions need to be criticised and challenged, and we do that,” she said.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

 

 

 

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