Aura Mahakam: Indigenous youth voices for forest protection

In May 2025, HII joined a strategic communication workshop alongside a group of local non-profit organizations, Indigenous community networks, and youth groups in East Kalimantan. This gathering marked the birth of the Mahakam Landscape Coalition, a collaborative campaign platform focused on forest protection and recognition of hutan adat (customary forests) in the Mahakam River Basin. Spanning over 77,000 km², this landscape encompasses upstream areas of intact rainforest and downstream zones under severe pressure from mining, logging, and agribusiness.

The campaign centers on the Mahakam Ulu, West Kutai, and Kutai Kartanegara districts, where Indigenous territories remain unrecognized, and deforestation is accelerating due to industrial expansion and global supply chain demands. With Indonesia committing to Net Zero Emissions by 2060 or sooner, and global finance pivoting toward nature-based solutions, now is the time to amplify Indigenous voices, secure their land rights, and ensure that conservation finance flows directly to forest guardians on the ground.

This campaign is not just about saving trees and curbing deforestation; it’s about defending the living knowledge systems, cultural identity, and justice-based stewardship of the Indigenous Peoples who have cared for these forests long before “sustainability” became a buzzword. The fate of biodiversity in the Mahakam landscape depends not solely on governments or corporations, but on the rightful custodians of these lands—communities whose stories, leadership, and resistance must shape the future of climate action in Indonesia.

Communication gap, challenges, goals, and desires

The Mahakam Landscape Coalition faces a multidimensional communication challenge. While Indigenous Peoples across East Kalimantan continue to protect some of the region’s last intact rainforests, their voices remain underrepresented, misunderstood, or emotionally disconnected from the broader public, particularly urban audiences. Forest stewards are often perceived as distant, unrelatable, or untouchable; their stories are viewed as too marginal to modern life, or too complex or overly politicized to care about. This empathy gap fuels emotional dissonance and even apathy, especially among the growing urban middle class, whose cultural and political capital is essential for driving climate and rights-based action.

This empathy gap is reinforced by dominant narratives that reduce forests to carbon sinks, extractive commodities, or abstract conservation zones, while erasing the people who live in, protect, and are sustained by them. As a result, public awareness remains fragmented and apathy persists, particularly among the influential urban middle class whose cultural capital could shift the conversation.

Although coalition members have implemented meaningful actions in the past, these efforts have struggled to break through due to:

• Siloed messaging that fails to connect emotionally;
• Low visibility of Indigenous voices in mainstream platforms;
• Lack of communications capacity among local groups to reach broader audiences with creative, strategic storytelling.

The coalition’s vision is to reverse this trend by building a unified, emotionally resonant public campaign that restores human connection to the forest and its people. This campaign will:

• Translate complex land rights and deforestation issues into relatable, identity-driven stories;
• Showcase Indigenous knowledge—such as medicinal ecology, forest hydrology, and cultural practices—as relevant to national resilience;
• Empower local communicators to become trusted narrators of their own realities;
• Use music, art, food, and culture to bridge the urban–rural disconnection.

That's why we are launching the Aura Mahakam campaign, which puts Indigenous voices at the center. Over the next 12 months, the Mahakam Landscape Coalition, led by Hutan Itu Indonesia and seven local partners, will launch a unified, culturally rooted storytelling movement. We aren't just posting facts; we are bringing the forest to the city. We will collaborate with local musicians to create a theme song, host artivism and cultural festivals featuring traditional dances and foods, and train 16 local youth communicators to tell their own stories through a website, social media, and public art installations.

In six months, we expect to see a surge in local engagement, with thousands of urban youth sharing stories of Indigenous resilience. Within a year, we aim to shift the national conversation, making forest protection a matter of personal pride rather than political obligation. This campaign is powered by the Mahakam Landscape Coalition, a network of eight organizations and hundreds of volunteers who believe that when we hear the forest's story, we will fight to save it. Together, we put the Mahakam forest and river on high alert for protection.