Jakarta – Two Indonesian national parks, homes to the endangered Komodo dragon and Javanese rhinoceros, have been earmarked by the United Nations for a million dollar ecotourism project.

The Ujong Kulon park, where fewer than 50 Javanese rhinos are said to remain, straddles the western tip of Java. Komodo park, home to the fabled giant reptile of the same name, lies among the Indonesian archipelago's eastern islands.

"Ecotourism should provide an opportunity to develop tourism in ways that minimise the industry's negative impacts and a way to actively promote the conservation of Earth's unique biodiversity," Klaus Toepfor, the head of the UN Environment Program, was quoted as saying in the Jakarta Post.

The million dollar fund, shared between the UN and the Aveda natural cosmetics manufacturer, is aimed at creating models for using tourism to promote the protection and preservation of important habitats, the Post said. It also strives to balance tourism demands with the needs of local people, the landscape and the environment.

The ecotourism funds come at a time of increasing anxiety over the rape of Indonesia's forests, including those supposedly protected in national parks, by illegal loggers. Indonesia is home to some 10 percent of the world's remaining tropical forest cover, according to the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency.

Rampant illegal logging saw 1.5 million hectares of the country's forests disappear annually between 1985 and 1997, the World Bank has reported. By December 1999, only some 20 million hectares of forests remained in Indonesia.

The 90,000-hectare Gunung Pulau national park on Borneo island has lost more than two-thirds of its forest over the past decade due to illegal logging, a Harvard University survey concluded earlier this month.