What is a MIDAS?
Get to know about what makes a place an International Designated Area
Rinjani‑Lombok carries more international and national designations than almost any landscape its size — a UNESCO Global Geopark, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, and a National Park, each with its own definition, its own governing logic, and its own legal basis. Understanding the difference is the fastest way to understand why this Agency exists.
A landscape recognised more than once — governed as one.
MIDAS stands for Multi International Designated Area(s) — a landscape that holds more than one internationally recognised status at the same time, each granted by a different programme, for different reasons, often with different boundaries and different reporting lines. Rinjani‑Lombok is one of these landscapes: it was named a UNESCO Global Geopark and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in the same year, 2018, and it contains a National Park that predates both.
Left unmanaged, that overlap creates a real governance risk: multiple designations, multiple stakeholders, multiple funding streams, and no single body accountable for the landscape as a whole. That is precisely the gap the Government of Nusa Tenggara Barat closed by establishing the Rinjani‑Lombok MIDAS Management Agency — one Agency, overseen by the Governor and coordinated through BAPPEDA, holding every designation under a single Board, a single financial vehicle, and a single set of programmes.
The sections below explain what each designation actually means — and why Rinjani‑Lombok qualifies for all three.
UNESCO Global Geopark
A living landscape, read through its rocks.
A UNESCO Global Geopark is a single, unified geographical area where sites and landscapes of international geological significance are managed under a holistic concept of protection, education, and sustainable development. It is a more recent and more integrated evolution of two earlier UNESCO area concepts — Biosphere Reserves and World Heritage Sites — combining the protection of geodiversity (geological heritage), biodiversity, and cultural diversity into a single management framework, rather than treating rocks, species, and culture as separate concerns.
A Geopark is not simply a protected area — it is a development tool. Its heritage is used to raise awareness of the challenges the local community faces: sustainable use of the earth’s resources, mitigation of climate-change effects, and reduction of natural-disaster risk, delivered through geotourism, local enterprise, and education rather than restriction alone.
UNESCO Biosphere Reserve
The whole island, held to one standard of balance.
A UNESCO Biosphere Reserve is a designation under UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Programme for places that demonstrate a balanced relationship between people and nature — combining conservation, sustainable development, and scientific research within a single zoning system: a strictly protected Core Zone, a Buffer Zone around it, and a wider Transition Area where communities live and work.
Rinjani‑Lombok’s Biosphere Reserve was designated in the same year as the Geopark, but at a different scale — its zonation spans the whole of Lombok Island (4,590.97 km²), making it the broader of the two designations, with the Geopark’s most important geoheritage site, the Samalas Caldera, sitting inside the Biosphere Reserve’s Core Zone. In practice, the two designations describe the same landscape at two different resolutions: the Geopark reads it through its geological and cultural sites, the Biosphere Reserve reads it as a single functioning ecological and human system.
National Park
A legally protected core, governed by national conservation law.
Unlike the Geopark and Biosphere Reserve — both international, UNESCO-granted designations — a National Park (Taman Nasional) is a domestic legal conservation category under Indonesian law, established and managed through the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (KLHK), typically through a dedicated park authority (Balai Taman Nasional). Its purpose is strict: to protect a defined conservation area’s ecosystems, species, and natural processes, with tightly regulated public access.
Taman Nasional Gunung Rinjani sits at the geographical heart of both the Geopark and the Biosphere Reserve — but it answers to a separate legal and institutional chain, distinct from the MIDAS Agency’s Board of Managers. Recognising that distinction matters: it is precisely because Rinjani‑Lombok holds an internationally protected core (the National Park) inside two internationally recognised sustainable-development designations (the Geopark and Biosphere Reserve) that coordination between institutions — not consolidation of everything under one legal authority — is the Agency’s actual job.
How these Designations Relate to One Another
One Landscape, Three Frameworks
| Key Area of Difference | UNESCO Global Geopark | UNESCO Biosphere Reserve | National Park |
|---|---|---|---|
| Granted by | UNESCO Global Geoparks Network | UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Programme | Government of Indonesia (KLHK) |
| Designated | 2018 | 2018 | 1997 |
| Area | 2,850 km² | Whole of Lombok Island (4,590.97 km²) | Defined conservation boundary within the landscape (41.330 hectares) |
| Core logic | Geodiversity + biodiversity + cultural diversity, read through named geosites | Zoned balance between conservation and human use, island-wide | Strict legal protection of a defined ecosystem |
| Governed by | Rinjani‑Lombok MIDAS Management Agency | Rinjani‑Lombok MIDAS Management Agency | Ministry of Environment and Forestry (KLHK) / Balai Taman Nasional |
Two of these three frameworks — the Geopark and the Biosphere Reserve — are held by the same Agency, which is what makes single-platform governance possible in the first place. The National Park remains under separate national authority, and the Agency’s role there is coordination and partnership, not management.
Why this Distinction Matters for Our Work
Every commitment on this website — the four flagship programmes, the Rinjani Development Fund, the partnership tiers — is designed to work across both designations the Agency governs, never the Geopark alone. Where the National Park is concerned, our role is to partner, align planning, and share a coherent public narrative — not to duplicate a mandate that already sits with KLHK.
