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ountries adjacent to the North Pole such as Canada and countries in Northern Europe, which are developed countries, are obsessed with the beauty of their heritage landscape.

This has led to the establishment of a large number of conservation areas to the benefit of people living in those countries.

The concept of establishing conservation areas has transmitted to the southern parts of the world, especially in tropical areas, including Indonesia.

The UNDP/FAO National Parks Development Project, the promulgation of the first Environmental Management Act and the third World Parks Congress held in Bali in 1982 led to the milestone of national parks (NPs) being established in Indonesia.

Several NPs were announced in the early 1980s, including some upgraded from protected areas (PAs) established during the colonial era.

However, many NPs have lost some or all of their natural habitats through conversion to agriculture. The adoption of a Western PA concept ran smoothly during the colonial era until the end of the 1970s, with PAs preserved from anthropogenic deforestation by their remoteness and by the generally low population density across the selected regions.

However, problems started to explode during the reformation era, supported by democracy euphoria and the pressing need for land to speed up economic development by responding to the high demand for international cash crops.

The conflicts have been exacerbated by the slow responses of NP management to the rapid social and political dynamic beyond the NP boundary, including: (a) the lack of clarity concerning the extent to which communities are involved in NP management: (b) the widespread district proliferation/partition during decentralization leading to several districts'€™ jurisdiction now overlapping (sometimes entirely) with conservation areas, leading to conflicting authority between district and NP management; (c) the failure of NP management to demonstrate the real economic contribution of preserving nature to support community livelihoods and enhance the gross domestic product of local government.

The commonly stated underlining causes behind poor NP management are: (a) improper budgeting allocation strategy that outweighs management cost at the expense of field operational cost, leading to a lack of resources to respond to actual field problems; (b) organization design, staffing and budgeting defined on the basis of blanket national assumptions rather than particular problems and requirements; (c) generic intervention designs with rigid administration accountability; (d) lack of support from the Environment and Forestry Ministry'€™s technical implementing units at regional level for NP multi-disciplinary technical and management issues; (e) the absence of incentives for NP field facilitators and forest rangers; (f) lack of political support for national government to protect NP areas and interests.

In fact, the situation is rooted in poor national and regional commitments to conservation. Most regional governments are unhappy if their administrative areas become NPs.

They keep questioning what the benefits are for them and what compensation they can expect to obtain.

The central government is half-hearted in supporting NPs, which are considered an additional cost center.

It is needless to ask the perceptions of land-based businesses and state-owned and private companies. Given the existing conditions, it is not surprising that NPs and their biodiversity are almost impossible to protect.

We need to rebuild a national commitment involving NP stakeholders at regional and national level to address the key question - whether we need to save NPs, with all the associated consequences.

We are a nation of ambiguous character. We show our wisdom to the world by ratifying the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), the Convention to Combat Decertification (CCD), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and others, but never really think how to materialize those commitments into real actions.

We like to boast that Indonesia is the third-largest tropical rain forest area in the world, a biodiversity superpower country at the center of coral triangle, but we don'€™t do very much to protect this heritage.

We need to take a firm stance on what we really want to strive for. If we want to save short-term human interests, then we should cut down all the remaining forested landscape, but if we want to save long-term human interests, then we have to conserve the remaining intact forest landscape for the benefit of the country and its future generations.

The choice is there, and the decision is ours.
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The writer is Tropenbos International Indonesia program director.