Endau Rompin (Rainforest to Reef)

Endau Rompin National Park covers some 807 square kilometres of rainforest, and supports many endangered and endemic species of flora and fauna. The East Coast Economic Region Development Council commissioned the production of a Strategic Implementation Plan (SIP) for the future of the Park.

We developed the Environmental Framework for the SIP in collaboration with Grant Associates and others. This included focussing on benefit to local communities as well as securing maintenance and support of ecosystem integrity. Challenges included the issues of environmental jurisdiction; land and access rights for local people; poaching; forestry; erosion and flooding; invasive species; road building and edge effects.

We visited the park and its surroundings on several occasions, including expeditions to some of its more remote waterways. We made assessments of ecological condition from general inspection, interviews with government and park personnel and local indigenous Orang Asli people living in the park. We then assessed ecological and experiential carrying capacity for tourism and made estimates of threshold tourism numbers that different areas could support in relation to ecological sensitivity. We also made proposals for ecological and economic links well beyond the park boundary.

The conceptual solution we devised avoids treating Endau Rompin as a discrete nature-based tourism resource, disconnected from the wider and increasingly developed landscape. Instead it treats the park as the heart of a wider sustainably managed development zone, the economy of which is based on sustainable tourism and other ecologically low-impact development. Expanding the study area beyond the confines of the Park enabled us to produce a strategy to both reduce/avoid environmental pressures on the Park, while at the same time providing many new complimentary attractions and revenue streams within its sphere of influence. We envisage this proposed expanded zone stretching from the Park’s western mountain tops, eastwards beyond the Park boundary and across the coastal plain to the South China Sea, and then offshore to the reefs and waters of the Mersing Islands. We suggested that this proposed sub-region be termed Peninsular Malaysia’s new ‘Rainforest to Reef Region’.