TITULO DECIMOCUARTO Delitos Contra la Economía Pública

Sarawak is the largest Malaysian state and is located on the island of Borneo (Figure 1.1). It covers a total land area of 124,450 square kilometres. It is a part of the Sundaland biodiversity hotspot (Myers et al., 2000), which covers 1.5million square kilometres and stretches from the Kangar-Pattani line near the Thai-Malaysian border to, at its eastern- most, the islands of Borneo and Bali. The Sundaland biodiversity hotspot is estimated to contain 25,000 vascular plant species (of which 60% is endemic to the hotspot), 380 mammal species (45.3% endemicity), 769 bird species (18.5% endemicity), 452 reptile species (53.8% endemicity), 244 amphibian species (80.3% endemicity) and 950 freshwater fish species (36.8% endemicity) (WWF, 2009). While all its lands make less up than 4% of the world’s total land area, Sundaland’s forests, when considered as a single block, form the third largest rainforest area in the world. Remarkably, while Sundaland is now a collection of archipelagos and a peninsula separated by vast areas of sea, the structure of rainforests throughout all the discrete blocks of land is rather uniform and characterised by dipterocarp trees.

The natural environment of Sarawak is characterised by the ancient, dipterocarp- dominated rainforests. Other terrestrial habitats include significant areas of peat swamp and kerangas and small areas of mangrove, coastal, montane and limestone forests. The forests of Sarawak have extremely high levels of diversity. Lambir Hills and the lowland forests of Gunung Mulu, for example, have been recorded to contain up to 290 and 223 tree species per hectare (Lee et al., 2002; Proctor et al., 1983). These habitats also harbour three species of Rafflesia, R.pricei, R.arnoldi and R.tuan-mudae, of which R.arnoldi is known to produce the largest individual flowers in the world, measuring up to 1 m in diameter (Meijer, 1997). Soil types in the terrestrial habitat are largely either humult ultisols or udult iltisols. Humult ultisols are generally nutrient poor and have a layer of raw humus on the surface. Udult humus is the exact opposite – generally fertile, without the raw humus layer (Corlett, 2009). In Sarawak, it has been noticed that where these two soil types are adjacent, their botanical associations differ markedly (Baillie et al., 2006; Potts et al., 2002).

43 Figure 3.3: Map of Malaysia showing the location of Sarawak.

Some of the world’s most extensive cave networks are also found in Sarawak. The Clearwater Cave system beneath Gunung Mulu stretches some 189km. In this area alone, over 100 caves are known, with a combined map length of 330km. The ‘Sarawak Chamber’is the world’s largest cave chamber, measuring 600m long by 415mwide and 80m high. It has a total floor area of 162700 square metres and a volume of 12 million cubic metres (Gillieson and Clark, 2010). Sarawak is also known for the Niah Caves, near Miri, where the earliest modern human remains and evidence of human habitation in the region exist (Barker et al., 2007; Hunt et al., 2007).

Besides the richness of the terrestrial habitat, the landscape of Sarawak is also remarkable for its extensive riverine network. The entire network in Sarawak is made up of 55 rivers, with a combined length of about 5,000 kilometres, of which 3,300 kilometres are considered navigable (Sovacool and Bulan, 2011b). Sarawak has very high and consistent levels of rainfall (ranging from 3300mm to 4600mm depending on locality) and high levels of humidity. Topographically, Sarawak can be divided into three regions. The border shared with Indonesian Kalimantan is characterised by mountain ranges and is the source of the river systems. The middle is a range of undulating hills up to 300m in altitude. The third region is the coastal lowland, which also contains peatlands and

44 well as the deltaic and alluvial plains and other wetlands which eventually drain out to the South China Sea (Sarawak Government, 2010).

The flooding of the forests of Balui and subsequent formation of land-bridge islands from hilltops constitute a form of habitat fragmentation and resembles the process (albeit much quicker) of the formation of the islands of Sundaland by flooding following the last glacial maximum 30 ka (Pelejaro et al, 1999). A summary of South-east Asian geological history is the subject of Hall (1998). Sundaland is defined by deep waters - the Indian Ocean to the south and west, and the channels on the east and north that divide it from Wallacea and the Philippines (Bird et al., 2005). The South-east Asian continental landmass, stretching from Indo-China to Burma to the present-day Malay Peninsula, is believed to have been present since the Early Eocene (c. 50 Mya), and in this time also consisted of the South-Western majority of Borneo and parts of the major Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. Borneo was situated much closer to the Malay Peninsula and was oriented clockwise to its current position (Hall, 1998). This continental shelf is identifiable at a bathymetric depth of 120m (Bird et al, 2005). As it was a large continental land mass, the Gulf of Siam did not exist. During the mid-Eocene (c. 42 Mya), a block fault created the Makassar Strait, through which Wallace’s Line runs, separating Borneo from Sulawesi (Moss and Wilson, 1998). Inundation first occurred during the early Miocene period (c. 20 Mya), when parts of Sumatra and Java were covered by a shallow sea. Isolation of these two volcanic islands by water was complete by mid- Miocene (c.15 Mya), forming the early incarnation of the Straits of Malacca. By the late Miocene (c. 10 Mya), Borneo had moved further from the Malay Peninsula and assumed its current position and orientation, but these areas were still connected by a savannah. The expansion of the South China Sea began in the early Pliocene (c. 5 Mya) and progressively reduced the land connection between the Malay Peninsula and Borneo (Hall, 1998). The connection between Borneo and the Malay Peninsula would be able to exist as long as the sea level was -40m (Bird et al, 2005).

At a bathymetric depth of -20m to -30m, there is a vast surface that seemingly connects Borneo to Sumatra and Java via the Karimata Islands and Banka and stretches towards the Malay Peninsula (Bird et al, 2005). This suggests that between 110 kya and approximately 20 kya, Sarawak and Borneo were connected to the Malay Peninsula, with periods of severance (Bird et al, 2005; Lambeck and Chappell, 2001). In summary,

45 the plausible periods of landbridge connections between Borneo and the Malay Peninsula were from 1) the period from the Eocene to late Oligocene (c. 25 Mya); 2) sometime at the end of the Miocene (c. 10 Mya) and 3) the last periods of any connectivity were in the late Pleistocene (c. 20 kya).

The geology of Borneo is complex and not fully understood, and is subject of intense research by people interested in South-east Asian paleogeography. It is believed that the island Borneo was formed by the process of accretion of ophiolites, island arc crusts and continental fragments (Parenti and Lim, 2005; Hutchison, 1996). Most of what is north-west Borneo today was still oceanic crust at the end of the Cretaceous (Wilson and Moss, 1999). The uplifting of central Borneo forming the highlands we see today started around the end of the Oligocene (c. 25 Mya), which allowed for the formation of the modern Rajang River. Large amounts of sediment were eroded from the volcanic middle of the island and deposited on the coastal edges, forming deltas like the Baram (Parenti and Lim, 2005). The ruggedness of the lifted interior has resulted in the dendritic shape of the lake post-inundation, and as later chapters will show, plays a significant role in impacting the livelihoods of the displaced communities.