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Last year, an ex-colleague and I applied for a grant from the Pulitzer Center's Rainforest Journalism Fund to explore stories in #Sabah's mangroves. Initially we explored a few other leads, but landed in the end on #mangroves (not technically rainforests but I guess connected enough to the fund's concerns). I'd long found these intertidal forests to be incredibly evocative and knew how crucial they are for mitigating our climate crisis, and felt that they should be given a little more attention.

As we wrote:

"With this project, we’re attempting to explore a few questions: How effective have [conservation] efforts been and what gaps remain? Can Indigenous communities make a greater case for their economic and conservationist roles, so often underestimated and undervalued? How can local communities and conservationists work with the authorities in common cause? What does proactive, not just reactive, stewardship look like?"

https://rainforestjournalismfund.org/projects/sabahs-mangrove-defenders

Go back to the top of this thread and you'll see one of Wen's stories—a short video on how the indigenous Tombonuo villagers of Kampung Sungai Eloi in Pitas, Kudat, are rehabilitating what's left of the #mangroves around them after a shrimp farm—#Sabah's largest ever—cleared 900 hectares.

She also has an accompanying photo essay for Macaranga:

https://rainforestjournalismfund.org/stories/pitas-villagers-restoring-mangroves-destroyed-failed-shrimp-farm

Here is my multimedia longread for Between The Lines, a Malaysian newsletter run by the indefatigable Darsh Kanda, with edits also by Edward Gomez.

Unlike Wen's, this story explores how we could practice proactive, not just reactive, stewardship. So often, news stories hinge on disasters that have happened, when it is often too late. The Lower #Kinabatangan Segama Wetlands may not be facing an immediately dire threat, but there are threats all the same.

https://betweenthelines.my/sabahs-custodians-of-the-mangrove-forests-between-land-and-sea/

I'm drawn to places I don’t know much about and on which there isn't too much online. #Sabah has #Malaysia’s largest expanse of #mangroves and the Lower #Kinabatangan-Segama #Wetlands forms the largest contiguous tract in the southern Sulu Sea, but I had never heard of it before. I was only familiar with the Kinabatangan tourists visit for wildlife-spotting river cruises. So my curiosity started from a very basic place: What does this place look like? How do the people there live?

I may yet post some reflections on my newsletter Movable Worlds in the near future—but for now, you can follow https://instagram.com/emilydingwrites to see the photo journal I am sharing of my reporting trip.

Start here: https://instagram.com/p/CrNlh91pa2t

These two photos were taken at my first stop: the village of Mumiang.

Travelling in #Sabah, it's struck me how many #conservation initiatives are funded by #palmoil companies, who have been a major source of #deforestation in the state. I had also noticed many conservationists working with palm oil plantations, in part because they need to access them to better study the #wildlife that are increasingly found to be roaming there. This threw up questions that led to my latest published story: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/6/28/can-plantations-value-more-than-profit-some-in-malaysia-think-so

I had meant to write a story about the mangrove rehabilitation projects done by the Sabah Forestry Department, but once I began to look into it, this other question cropped up and began to interest me more. I hope the story offers some food for thought—though it can be disheartening to see how big corporate actors are often given a pass to do harm first, and because they become too powerful to ignore, how changemakers are then forced to work with them to clean up the mess...

I'll be writing extended reflections on this for my #newsletter at some point too. Sign up here if you'd like to read it and catch up with the archive in the meantime: https://movableworlds.co—thanks in advance!