HAkA Annual Report 2025

“2025 was a year that asked more from us than we thought we were ready to give. For over a decade, HAkA’s story has been one of forests: standing between the Leuser Ecosystem and the forces that would clear it, and walking beside the communities of Aceh as they defend the rivers, peatlands, wildlife corridors, and living systems that hold this landscape together. We have always known why this work matters. In late November, we learned it in the most immediateway possible.”

“When Cyclone Senyar moved in from the Strait of Malacca, none of us imagined that a storm so rare and so far south could bring such devastation. Within days, floods and landslides had torn through 18 of Aceh’s 23 districts and cities. In that moment, the relationship between forest protection and human survival was no longer an argument to be made in meetings, maps, or policy papers. It was visible in broken roads, submerged villages, families cut off from help, and communities forced to carry uncertainty on their shoulders.”

“The disaster reminded us that ecological loss is never abstract. When forests are weakened, people are left more exposed. Villages we had walked through on patrol were swept away. Roads our teams had driven a hundred times were gone. And beneath the shock sat a harder truth: the watersheds that failed under that rainfall were also landscapes already weakened by years of deforestation upstream, the very places we had been warning about all along. This was not simply a natural disaster. It was, in part, a landscape telling us what happens when forests are no longer intact.” Farwiza Farhan, Executive Director HAkA Foundation