Forever Sabah
🌐A 25-year transformational program facilitating Sabah's shift to a diversified, equitable circular economy. Operating as a social collaborative movement rather than a traditional NGO, they weave connections across watersheds, forests, and coastal zones.
Bioregional Context
Sabah occupies the northern portion of Borneo, the world's third-largest island, characterized by ancient rainforests, diverse marine ecosystems, and Mount Kinabalu. This biodiversity hotspot has faced extensive deforestation due to industrial palm oil and timber extraction, losing over 30% of its primary forest since the 1970s.
- Tags
- More Than Human Knowledge Participatory Strategies Citizen or Community Science Commons Governance Protocols Watershed Repair Traditional Ecological Knowledge Result Based Mechanisms Renewable Energy Geographic and Ecological Mapping Vegetation Planting Governance Design Political Advocacy Rights of Nature Learning Programs Cultural Hub or Learning Center
Background
Sabah lies on the northern third of Borneo—rainforest, reefs, and Mount Kinabalu—home to many Indigenous communities, especially Dusun peoples, whose land rights and livelihoods face extraction and climate pressure.
Industrial palm and timber have cleared large areas: more than 30% of primary forest since the 1970s. Fragmentation has disrupted wildlife movement, strained watersheds, and weakened cultural and economic foundations for those communities.
Origins and Network
Forever Sabah grew from a two-year, cross-sector question: where Sabah lands in fifty years on a business-as-usual path. That process set priorities and early projects. It operates less as a conventional NGO than as a social collaborative movement steering a 25-year shift toward a diversified, equitable circular economy.
Philosophy & Approach
Change is not treated as something grants alone can buy. The group foregrounds shared experience and “currencies” such as responsibility, participation, reciprocity, and trust to align actors at scale. A forever horizon and an Indigenous imperative—to belong to and be accountable to place—run through the programme design.
Activities
Human-Elephant Harmony
Since 2016, Human-Elephant Harmony has worked with Dusun communities, agencies, and partners to treat conflict as a coexistence problem. Herds returned in 2014 after absence since mid-1980s forest fires. Telupid’s forests had largely become oil palm; elephants used plantations for food and reserves for daytime cover, while unfenced smallholders bore crop damage—fueling calls for relocation. From March–December 2016, Forever Sabah worked with the Telupid District Office; village input recalled older protocols of mutual respect with elephants, so the frame shifted from “conflict” to Human-Elephant Harmony. Workshops began in three villages (a fourth joined in 2018) around a four-part plan: train a Community Elephant Ranger Team, map elezone zones, build citizen science, and fence selected sites. Kopisuladan di Aki (“friendship between villagers and elephants” in Dusun Labuk)—nine young professionals with strong field knowledge—received a February 2018 National Conservation Trust Fund grant (RM 200,000 over 22 months, co-financed by the U.S. Shared Earth Foundation at USD 65,000); five members became Honorary Wildlife Wardens. “Listening to elephants” tracks movement, diet, and use of oil palm. Observation showed elephants following machinery that clears mature palms to feed on chipped replanting waste—evidence that access to oil palm matters for nutrition in these landscapes and that trade-offs around plantation entry differ from simple removal narratives. No further translocations have been attempted from this area since CERT formed; several calves have been raised in Telupid. The team estimates about 25–50 elephants use Telupid—the northern edge of the wider Central Sabahan population.
Watershed Conservation and Payment for Ecosystem Services
The Babagon catchment is a 3,001 ha forested watershed serving roughly 57% of Greater Kinabalu’s water demand, yet its three Indigenous Dusun communities have seen little benefit. Babagon Dam (1997) flooded Kg Tampasak—graves, orchards, padi—forcing resettlement below the impoundment with lasting harm. To protect water quality, the state restricted livelihoods on upstream Dusun lands and pressed for state-led stewardship of territories communities had long managed. After four months’ scoping and a one-year PES readiness phase, Forever Sabah brokered a multi-year dialogue among communities, government, and private actors to design Payment for Ecosystem Services. The fund model treats communities as trustees with government and others, pooling and returning payments from prospective streams—if cabinet approves and territorial rights are recognised, that could support durable jobs in monitoring, catchment care, and restoration. Mirani Momogompi Tadon Waig (MMTW) is the trained local team for monitoring, nurseries, and restoration, blending science and customary practice—including dragonfly and fish indicators—to read watershed health.
Renewable Energy Transition
SabahRE2 (August 2021) is a four-partner consortium pursuing energy equity, livelihoods, and wellbeing for rural Sabahans. Sabah holds about 72% of Malaysia’s unelectrified rural households, so off-grid renewables are a practical lever. Year one produced a public roadmap for rural renewable electrification. The target is 200 renewable mini-grids by 2030. A demand map of ~400 villages yielded 206 meeting readiness criteria; feasibility work advanced for 35 mini-grids serving 57 villages across diverse biocultural settings.
Mangrove Conservation and Spatial Planning
SPaCES (Spatial Planning for Conservation, Sustainable Economic Development and Society) supplies mapping and planning support across Forever Sabah programmes. Current work maps mangrove extent, loss, threats, and restoration need toward protecting Sabah’s mangrove estate. The Lower Kinabatangan & Segama programme deepens co-governance—community protocols, Locally Managed Marine Areas, and Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas—in a large mangrove–estuary system. Livelihoods (e.g. solar cold storage for fishers, ecotourism) aim to reduce extraction pressure while communities steward the wetlands they rely on.
Legal Innovation and Policy Development
The Legal Innovation Team supports Forever Sabah with strategic legal analysis—entry points in statute for a circular economy, and space to prototype policy, legal, and institutional options. It works with civil society, lawyers, and scholars to review Sabah land and environmental law, compare international models, and track relevant global processes. An initial output is a multimedia handbook on Sabah land and environmental law, with briefs summarising key laws, policies, and institutions in plain language.
Learning and Capacity Building
Forever Sabah Institute prototypes ways to strengthen people in the network as changemakers—blurring lines between theory and practice, student and teacher, local and global, classroom and field.
Vision and Legacy
The 25-year programme still aims at a diversified, equitable circular Sabah. Climate responses are increasingly institutionalised, yet communities remain on the front line. Watershed work, mangrove and riparian care, rice revival, renewable energy—threads that once ran in parallel—now need to be joined, scaled, and woven into mitigation and adaptation in a coordinated way.
Sources
| Type | Name | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Article | The SPaCES Project | ↗ |
| Article | Sabah Renewable Energy Rural Electrification Roadmap | ↗ |
| Article | Riparian conservation and livelihoods on the Segama river | ↗ |
| Article | Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) Pilot Project | ↗ |
| Article | Legal Innovation Team | ↗ |
| Article | Advancing Human-Elephant Harmony in telupid | ↗ |
| Article | Forever Sabah Institute | ↗ |
| Report | Bioregional Governance - Asian Case Studies & Framework | ↗ |