Of the 371 villages around the national park or buffer zone, 270 villages in four provinces have settlements close to the boundary of Kerinci Seblat National Park (TNKS). Residents of these villages often work on land within the national park area and take their forest products. The amount of land that has been opened in TNKS reaches 105,000 hectares, some of which has been opened before the boundary fishing.
For most of them, their lives depend on forest sources. But at the same time, there are also those who guard and defend the TNKS area from encroachment and illegal logging.
According to research by Salwa Nadhira and Sambas Basuni from the Department of Forest Resources Conservation and Ecotourism of the Faculty of Forestry IPB, it was found that there are only nine out of 530 (1.7%) conservation areas in Indonesia with officially designated buffer zones. This condition is mainly due to the absence of buffer zone institutions at the local government level.