To stop illegal logging, communities surrounding Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, identified two solutions: training in alternative livelihoods and access to affordable health care. The livelihood training included smallholder goat rearing, compost production, and organic farming. To improve health care, the NGO Health in Harmony created a mentoring program engaging volunteer physicians from Yale, Stanford, and Rochester in a new rainforest clinic for recently graduated Indonesian physicians analogous to residency training programs in U.S. teaching hospitals. The program provided a 70% subsidy for patients from non-logging villages. After five years of program implementation, illegal logging decreased by 68%, and the community has had significant health improvements. Jeff Wyatt of the University of Rochester presented on this innovative planetary health initiative in Indonesian Borneo, which emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to reverse man’s unprecedented degradation of the environment, and the program’s prospects for replication.
Jeff Wyatt, DVM, MPH, is professor and chair of comparative medicine at the University of Rochester and environmental justice advocate for the Seneca Park Zoo. Previously, Wyatt has investigated human rabies postexposure prophylaxis during a raccoon rabies epizootic; lemur health in forests of Madagascar; the utility of serum for non-lethal tracking of pollutant bioaccumulation in repatriated lake sturgeon in the Great Lake; and the impact of goat herd health mentoring programs in resource constrained communities in Indonesian Borneo.