Visiting Harapan is quite a trek. An overnight flight to Jakarta, the sprawling frenetic capital of Indonesia on the island of Java, via Singapore's serenely calm Changi airport, then an hour's internal flight to Jambi on the larger island of Sumatra, finishing up with a 3 hour journey by car. The roads in places have cavernous potholes and there's always loads of traffic. The last hour of the journey is entirely through oil palm plantation - eerily quiet and deserted. Not only do these plantations have only a small percentage of the species found in rainforests, they don't have people in them either.
Driving through miles of oil palm is notable enough, but it's only from the air that the true extent of these plantations becomes apparent. They occupy vast areas of not just Indonesia, but also neighbouring Malaysia too.
The demand for the oil from oil palm is what drives more and more planting. Palm oil is found in a huge range of products, everything from biscuits to shampoo. While all countries use the oil, a large proportion is exported to the developed world. Our increasing demands to consume products with that contain palm oil mean that we're creating the market in Indonesia that pays farmers to grow the crop, or to work for companies that do. In other words, what we purchase in the UK can be linked right back to plantations like those we drive through on the way to Harapan, or that are planted by the illegal occupiers in Harapan.
What makes the encroachment situation worse is that with so much land being converted to oil palm plantations, in some places there's little left for local people to build a house, or grow crops or other valuable products such as rubber. The cash brought in by oil palm means all other land uses get displaced. And of course this means that a nice bit of unoccupied unfarmed forest, like that in found in Harapan, looks like a great place to settle.
This is the dilemma facing us, the Indonesian and other governments and conservationists worldwide.
And we're working on fixing the problem. In addition to the work we're doing to protect the Harapan Rainforest, we need to find ways of making the trees worth more by keeping them standing than they would be chopped down. Financing associated with reducing greenhouse gas emissions is one possibility - we're looking into this at Gola in Sierra Leone and we'll need to see if it can be done at Harapan.
Also, as part of Together For Trees, we're working with Tesco to look into ways we can reduce the impact of what we consume in the UK has on rainforests.
But we're not the only ones who can step up and do their bit for rainforests - you can help too. Whether it's looking for the Rainforest Alliance Certified seal as you shop, making sure that the wood and paper products you buy have the FSC logo, simply using less shampoo, finding out more about where the products you buy have come from or donating your Green Clubcard points to Together For Trees, every step, no matter how small, helps.