Kostajasa Cooperative

KOSTAJASA is tackling deforestation in Indonesia by focusing on protecting the highly desired mahogany tree and creating jobs in impoverished rural communities. If you would like to support this project then please make a donation.

A highly valued tropical wood, mahogany has been severely overharvested, yet the market for this resource keeps growing. Incentives to continue cutting down forests to harvest remaining mahogany have led to habitat loss, water shortages, and community economic decline, among other problems. The KOSTAJASA cooperative is a group of local families who have banded together to reverse this trend.

With support from TFT, KOSTAJASA aims to keep the forests intact, to expand the hectares of forest, and to create a sustainable economy based on cooperatively managing these forests for the long-term. Members are learning how to plant and grow trees, monitor and protect wildlife, and sell to high value markets for responsibly-sourced mahogany. KOSTAJASA currently manages 84 hectares and has the potential to grow to over 3,000 hectares.

Through this project, cooperative members receive higher prices and a consistent market for their wood. This allows them to invest in planting more trees, in practicing better forest management and in expanding the area of forest they manage. Central to this work is KOSTAJASA's pursuit of ‘green certification' through the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). As a globally -recognized seal-of-approval for environmentally and socially responsible forestry, FSC certification provides KOSTAJASA with robust standards for managing their forest and for selling their products to a global market that prefers FSC.

Your donation to KOSTAJASA will cover training costs in sustainable forestry, ongoing costs of FSC-certification and for developing a community business cooperative to help trade their certified products.