High Conservation Value Forest (HCVF) is a concept defined in 1999 by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) for use in forest certification. It has been adopted for conservation and natural resource planning, policy, advocacy and improving purchasing policies for wood-based materials by private sector companies and NGOs.

HCVF is a forest that contains one or more High Conservation Values (HCVs). An HCVF analysis is a framework that both captures standard conservation and spatial planning information and presents in a format consistent with FSC certification requirements.

In 2003 WWF conducted an HCVF assessment of Riau [4], a province on the island of Sumatra. The Riau study treated the province as one landscape. It was based on satellite data and literature. It defined eight remaining large forest blocks in Riau and treated each as a sub-landscape. A sub-landscape analysis of each is needed to fully assess the conservation values at local levels, and the threats to those values.

This report presents an HCVF analysis of one of these remaining forest blocks, the Giam Siak Kecil (GSK) landscape. It is a peat swamp area of 600,000 ha incorporating two protected areas - the Giam Siak Kecil Game Reserve of 75,000 ha and Bukit Batu Game Reserve of 24,800 ha. The area comprises around 350,000 ha of largely intact peat swamp forest, the remainder Acacia plantation and heavily degraded forest with cover lost since 1985. The area was identified in the Riau assessment as one of 8 relatively large blocks of intact contiguous forest left in the province. The analysis:

• Treat the area as one landscape for assessment
• Follows FSC certification guidelines as currently used in Indonesia.
• Treats the GSK landscape in a way that a FSC certification assessment would
  survey the operations and operational impacts of a forest management unit.
• Follows the methodology described in the HCVF Toolkit for Indonesia [3].
• Was conducted by ecological experts who audit for FSC accredited bodies in
  Indonesia. They demarcated HCVs and HCVF as they would expect a company
  to, were it responsible for identifying and managing HCVF in the GSK
  landscape.