After more than two decades restoring a degraded rainforest in the East Malaysian state of Sabah, Swedish furniture giant IKEA and its partners are launching a new research lab to share their findings and spur more reforestation efforts.
IKEA, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and the government-backed Sabah Foundation announced the launch of the Living Rainforest Restoration Lab last Thursday, which they said would shift their work from “hands-on restoration to a stronger focus on collaborative research, learning and knowledge sharing”.
“The initiative aims to translate practical restoration insights into methods applicable across tropical forests worldwide,” it said in a statement. “Through collaboration with academia, the lab supports scientists and practitioners in developing and scaling effective restoration approaches.”
IKEA will fund the research programme for ten years, currently covering 24 projects jointly led by SLU and Malaysian universities. It is one of SLU’s largest ongoing research initiatives.
The new lab will build on the results of IKEA’s Sow a Seed initiative, initiated in 1998 when founder Ingvar Kamprad proposed the restoration of a tropical forest in Borneo. The project has been funded in part by in-store donations from customers, IKEA said.
So far, IKEA, SLU and its partners in Sabah have restored some 18,500 hectares of heavily degraded forest, an area larger than the city of Paris, said IKEA. This was largely done through the Innoprise-IKEA Tropical Rainforest Project (Inikea) in the Tawau District of Sabah. Innoprise is the investment holding vehicle of the Sabah Foundation and controls publicly listed oil palm plantations firm Innoprise Plantations Berhad, among other investments.
IKEA said that over the past 25 years, some five million seedlings of around 90 indigenous tree species have been planted in forests that were previously degraded by fires and logging activities. The recreated forest ecosystem has seen wildlife such as pygmy elephants, orangutans, clouded leopards and hornbills return to the area, it added.
The project has been reported on by local media outlet Bernama as one of Malaysia’s largest and longest-running forest rehabilitation initiatives. The Inikea area has been gazetted since 2012 as part of the Sungai Tiagau Class 1 Forest Reserve, meaning it falls under the strictest protections for environmental and watershed conservation.
“The project has not only restored forests and biodiversity but also generated valuable knowledge. With the Living Rainforest Restoration Lab, we now want to share these insights more broadly, so they can help guide the restoration of other degraded rainforests around the world,” IKEA’s chief sustainability officer Lena Julle said.
