Dear Masarang supporters,
2022 is coming to an end and so are the effects of the devasting corona virus pandemic. Since a few months we have started hosting our first volunteers since several years. Tasikoki has been and is active in releasing confiscated and rehabilitated Sulawesi wildlife to protected natural habitats and has been busy sending hundreds of animals back to their places of origin in Indonesia while more smuggled animals will be arriving back from the Philippines.
With the arrival of Reino as our new director, our palm sugar factory is now diversifying and upgrading its capacity, while tapping the sugar palms that Masarang planted years ago and that are now producing the valuable palm juice that we process into our sugar that we now brand as “The most sustainable”, a claim that we stand by. We are also developing new ways to cooperate with the state energy company Pertamina to utilize the geothermal heat for more diverse applications such as drying of agricultural products.
Our Temboan project has really taken off. We have planted close to a hundred thousand new trees already that directly or indirectly were supported through the work of Benni Over and his supporters like the Wiedtal Gymnasium from Germany. And just this December we received the confirmation from ‘Trees For All’ for their support to rehabilitate another 50 hectares of grassland through the planting of another 160.000 trees over the coming three years, starting this January, 2023.
We have now almost reached our end goal in the land acquisition sponsored by our treasurer Johannes Freije and the protection of 4 kilometers of beach where five species of sea turtles will continue to find safe nesting grounds that are not disturbed by light pollution and where Masarang Hong Kong supported us with another turtle hatchery to increase the number of turtle hatchlings that make it back to the sea on top of the ongoing efforts in our Tulap turtle project.
In 2023 we will connect our Temboan project to the world by means of various live data feeds such as microphones that record how life comes back in those degraded lands through our tree planting, through cameras on towers that allow us to provide almost real time images of the reforestation efforts and through environmental monitoring such as water quality, rainfall, microclimate, hydrology, coral restoration, wildlife returning to the area, etc. We will work with diverse science specialists to look at various groups of organisms.
What will especially stand out for the Temboan project is the assessment of the various benefits that our project is generating in terms of new permanent and better jobs for the local people, food security, the amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere, the increase in biodiversity in the Temboan project area, the number of people learning from our approaches and the application of a huge range of environmentally friendly technologies in our area. We can do this thanks to the cooperation between the Minaesa technical university in Tomohon, working together with other environmental groups and the build-up of our core team in the Masarang Foundation.
We still have much to do but what I hope will be clear to all of you is that Masarang is back in full swing and that hopefully conditions will continue to improve and we can expand our network so we can, with your continued support, demonstrate and prove that there are real natural solutions to the problems of this world. Solutions that will reduce the amount of land needed for our needs, that help the climate and biodiversity conservation and improve the well-being of local people.
Wishing you a happy and healthy holiday season on behalf of the whole Masarang team.
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