UMS makes amends for a tropical forest that it has replaced

Fifteen years ago, the 404 hectares (999 acres) of rolling hills belonged to a tropical forest teeming with wild plants and animals in the heart of Kota Kinabalu city. Now, concrete buildings of the Universiti Malaysia-Sabah, Malaysia’s 9th public university, sprawl over them. And as if to make amends, a little belatedly perhaps, the UMS is rehabilitating about 121 hectares of its remaining hilly woodland which has been damaged during construction of the university and is overgrown with thickets, weeds and parasitic trees. The university is growing commercial timber trees on what is now known as the UMS hills.

“We hope that we will have a good forest in the middle of Kota Kinabalu,” says Abdul Hamid Ahmad, director of UMS’s Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ITBC).

In a way, the move is to pre-empt anyone wanting to build commercial complexes or housing, or grow oil palms on the UMS hills, about 10 kms from Kota Kinabalu city centre, according to Masidi Manjun, minister of tourism, culture and environment. He launched a campaign on May 22 to grow 2,100 tropical hardwood trees such as ironwood (Eusideroxylon) and sandalwood on the hills to mark World Biodiversity Day.

The hills at 190 metres tall are one and half times taller than the 30-storey Sabah Foundation building at Likas in Kota Kinabalu. They can house three multi-million-ringgit shopping complexes of the size of Sabah’s flagship 1Borneo which has a built-up area of 418,064 square metres (4.5m square feet). Otherwise 121 hectares of oil palms will give an annual return of 1.5m ringgit ($452,000) based on about 500 ringgit a tonne of fresh oil palm fruit bunches from a harvest of 25 tonnes a hectare.

About 200 seedlings and saplings were planted on that day by 500 people at a cost of 35,000 ringgit. They were part of the 2,100 belonging to 12 species of trees of the rainforest provided by the Sabah Foundation and the Forest Research Centre at Sepilok in the east coast timber town of Sandakan.

Kamaruzaman Ampon, UMS vice-chancellor, says his university has intended to rehabilitate some of the remaining hilly forests the day bulldozers and excavators moved in to clear the land for the campus.

“Plans began in 2000 when we moved into the main campus and the ITBC,” he says. “The UMS hills will become an important landmark and a tourist attraction.”

But rehabilitating the hills is not easy. Ironically, the UMS faces a daunting task of getting rid of acacia mangium trees which were introduced to Sabah more than 30 years ago to grow forest plantations for pulp and paper. These fast-growing tropical hardwood trees, according to Mr Hamid, are monopolistic and parasitic.

Botanists say no other plants and trees could survive in a forest where acacia mangium is dominant as it takes up all the soil nutrients. The acacia tree, which is native to Africa, survives well in drought and is resistant to heat.

“You cannot burn it,” says Mr Hamid. “It will grow even stronger after it has been burnt. The seeds will germinate even if they have been boiled.” He says the acacia trees have already invaded about a quarter of the UMS hills.

Botanists say removing acacia trees and preventing their growth is likely to be slow and painstaking. Big trees have to be cut down while smaller ones and saplings will be uprooted. The problem is finding them in the hills and deploying workers to do the job.

The best way to outsmart the acacia trees is through the Japanese Miyawaki method of "dense planting" of trees such as the ironwood and sandalwood, according to botanists and forestry experts. Thirty centimetres tall saplings with well developed root systems are planted close together to simulate growth of natural forests. Hopefully they will leave no room for new acacia trees to grow.

The Japan International Co-operation Agency (Jica), which is carrying out forest and biodiversity conservation programmes in Sabah, is helping UMS. It is spending about 16m ringgit on such projects over the next five years. – Insight Sabah

– With reporting by Jenney Juanis; Pictures by Henry Matakim