APRIL Signs 5-year Partnership with Global Conservation Science Body at IUCN Congress

APRIL Group has signed a five-year strategic collaboration with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) aimed at strengthening conservation science and applying evidence-based solutions.

Announced at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi, the collaboration will combine APRIL’s operational reach in Indonesia and IUCN’s global scientific expertise, and will help the company to expand its use of conservation tools in the natural landscapes it manages – around 465,000 hectares in total.

The collaboration is also intended to advance robust conservation science and build capacity that supports national and international biodiversity goals.

Anderson Tanoto, Managing Director at RGE and member of the Executive Committee at APRIL, said the company’s approach to conservation was focused on practical action, rather than aspirational targets. “Businesses today are expected to move beyond pledges and deliver results that are credible, practical and measurable on the ground,” he said.

“By combining global science with local action, this partnership enhances our conservation and restoration programmes and engages a wider network of experts and stakeholders to achieve meaningful biodiversity outcomes.”

Leading from the landscape

The IUCN World Conservation Congress also saw a number of APRIL and RGE senior business and sustainability leaders sharing presentations about APRIL’s approach and lessons from implementation on the ground.

APRIL Group Chairman, Bey Soo Khiang, addressed a session on how to scale successful conservation initiatives. This is a pressing problem because although around two thirds of conservation initiatives globally are effective at halting or even reversing biodiversity loss, animals and plant populations are still declining globally. Nearly three quarters of wildlife populations have been lost since the 1970s.

Bey Soo Khiang, Chairman APRIL Group, speaking during the plenary session at the IUCN World Conservation Congress

Bey explained how APRIL’s Production-Protection approach, where the company’s conservation areas benefit from the physical protection provided by being surrounded by a ring of plantation,  means encroachment by people who might conduct illegal logging or wildlife poaching is much harder.

He noted that the company’s protection is also financial. For every tonne of plantation wood delivered to the company’s mill site, APRIL sets aside one dollar for its conservation fund, with US$14.8 million allocated in 2024. This finances its own conservation work, but has also been used to support other conservation projects in financial distress.

“We have built resilience in terms of protecting our own conservation area as well as trying to apply this concept of Production-Protection to scale up conservation beyond our concessions,” said Bey.

Lucita Jasmin, RGE’s Group Director of Sustainability, emphasised that effective sustainability and nature conservation strategies must be anchored in purpose, endorsed by the Board and management, and embedded in operations, rather than treated as parallel initiatives. Close collaboration between sustainability and operational teams is critical to translate these strategies into measurable outcomes on the ground.

“Delivery gives you integrity and transparency gives you trust. We believe that progress in sustainability is not built on dramatic gestures, but on consistent work on the ground that makes a real difference,” Jasmin conveyed in a session on ‘The Business Case for Nature.’

A commitment to doing

Congress attendees got a description of what the APRIL’s conservation commitment looks like on the ground. “We’re involved in conservation, because we can be. We have the financial resources to do it,” APRIL’s Director of Sustainability, Craig Tribolet told a session on conservation partnerships between indigenous groups and the private sector.

But he added that the company also has the advantage that it can invest and learn as it progresses, in a way that the public sector can’t always do.

Craig Tribolet, Director of Sustainability and External Affairs, APRIL Group, speaking at the IUCN World Conservation Congress

“Because APRIL funds its own investment, it has greater latitude than projects reliant on public funds to adopt a trial an error approach where appropriate to investigate what works,” said Tribolet.

An example of that is APRIL’s Community Conservation scheme where the company is working with local communities to incentivize them to preserve areas of natural forest that they control. The intention is to more than triple the size of the scheme to 100,000 hectares by the end of the decade.

“We will pay for the environmental service of conservation,” said Tribolet, “but we have to be prepared to learn from each other and be prepared to engage with people whose perspectives are going to be very different from ours.”

John Pereira, Deputy Head of Operations at Restorasi Ekosistem Riau (RER), APRIL’s flagship forest conservation project, shared updates on progress achieved over the last decade. The RER project is an area of highly biodiverse peat swamp forest around the size of Greater London that is home to Sumatran tigers and Sunda pangolins among 80 species listed by the IUCN Red List.

In the past year, it has played host to biologists studying the behaviour and ecology of Malayan Sun Bears as well as a separate study on the conservation status of medium to large terrestrial mammals. A multi-year survey of dragonfly and damselfly species (Odonata) found 100 species across 12 families, including five that had previously never been recorded in Indonesia, and one that is entirely new to science.