http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4470&Itemid=214
New Study Slams Indonesia's Forest Protection
Written by Our Correspondent
Thursday, 03 May 2012
SBY says it isn't happening
US National Academy of Sciences says forest is being converted even faster than
thought
Indonesia’s tropical forest is being converted to oil palm plantations even
faster than was thought, giving rise of the possibility that only 4 percent of
forest outside of protected areas will be intact, according to a study by 10
scientists for the US National Academy of Sciences.
The report, available here, completed in March, says that two-thirds of all
Indonesian forest outside of protected areas has been leased to oil palm
companies, and that by 2020 a third will be in plantations. Scientists from
Yale University, Stanford University, the Carnegie Institution for Science at
Cranfield University, the University of Virginia, Indiana University and the
Santa Fe Institute participated in the study.
Although Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono last September pledged
to uphold sustainable forest practices, in Jakarta today, a coalition of green
groups led by Greenpeace said the moratorium the government had proposed was
weak and ineffective. Although the president in a speech to a forest protection
association said in November that the government had set up programs to enhance
agricultural productivity as well as ensure an adequate stock of staple food,
including rice, as well as launching a tree-planting campaign aimed at planting
at least 1 billion new trees annually, the government’s plans are largely
viewed as a flop.
A Greenpeace spokesman said the ban put in place to protect the forest by the
government excludes large tracts of the country’s peatland forests. An earlier
review of the maps by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that the
moratorium leaves almost 50 percent of Indonesia’s 100 million hectares of
natural forest and peatland unprotected. Kalimantan contains a full third of
Indonesia’s peatlands, which harbor the most tropical peat carbon worldwide.
Clearing and draining these peatlands produce considerable carbon emissions
from peat oxidation and burning.
The two-year moratorium came into effect last year as the centerpiece of a deal
with Norway, which pledged $1 billion to Indonesia under a UN-backed scheme to
reduce emissions from deforestation. Indonesia is often cited as the world’s
third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, due mainly to rampant deforestation
by the palm oil, mining and paper industries. While globally deforestation
accounts for up to 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. In Indonesia,
however, that figure is 85 percent, making the country one of the highest
emitters in the world.
The research by the team from the US National Academy of Scientists appears to
back that up, using high-resolution satellite time-series cameras and
socieconomic surveys on the ground to describe industrial oil palm plantations
as a rapidly increasing but largely unmeasured source of tropical land cover
change, Focusing on agrarian community lands in West Kalimantan, the group
assessed previous expansion and projected future land conversion.
Although fire was the primary cause of 93 percent of the deforestation between
1989 and 2008 and 69 percent of net carbon emissions by 2007–2008, the team
said, oil palm directly caused 27 percent of total and 40 percent of peatland
deforestation.
In 2008, oil palm plantation leases spanned roughly 65 percent of the East
Kalimantan region including 62 percent on peatlands and 59 percent of
community-managed lands, with only about 10 percent of lease area was planted.
“Projecting business as usual by 2020 roughly 40 percent of regional and 35
percent of community lands are cleared for oil palm, generating 26 percent of
net carbon emissions. Intact forest cover is expected to decline to 4 percent
and the proportion of emissions sourced from peatlands will increase by 38
percent,” the team said.
Since 1990, according to the scientists’ report, Indonesia has experienced one
of the most rapid plantation expansions worldwide. The Agricultural Ministry’s
records indicate that from 1990 to 2010, oil palm area increased 600 percent to
7.8 million hectares, with more than 90 percent of the development occurring in
Sumatra and Kalimantan, regions that lost roughly 40 percent of their lowland
forests between 1990 and 2005.
“As a result of this extensive deforestation, annual greenhouse gas emissions
in Indonesia—currently among the top 10 national emitters—are sourced
predominantly from land cover/land use change,” the report says. “However, the
locations, patterns, and land cover sources for oil palm plantation expansion;
the extent and distribution of undeveloped oil palm leases pending near-term
development; and carbon emissions from oil palm agriculture remain largely
undocumented.
That is because while optical remote sensing satellites such as Landsat have
sufficient resolution to detect small land cover patches and punctuated land
cover change, they are hampered by cloud cover and can’t be used to map carbon
stocks. Other technologies such as light detection and ranging and radar,
however are effective for mapping aboveground biomass in tropical forests and
even below-ground carbon in peatlands.
Since the 1980s, Kalimantan’s intact forests have experienced massive
degradation from logging in federal timber concessions, the report states,
although forest degradation from logging is difficult to detect.
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Palm Oil is Out of Control
written by OrangutanOutreach, May 03, 2012
Around 90% of the global supply of palm oil comes from Indonesia & Malaysia and
this has come at a tremendous environmental cost. Indonesian forests are being
burned to the ground-- releasing so much carbon into the atmosphere that
Indonesia now ranks only behind China and the US in carbon emissions-- and it
is barely industrialized. The UNEP estimates that the forests of Indonesia are
being cleared at a rate of 6 football fields per minute every minute of every
day.
The palm oil industry is guilty of truly heinous ecological atrocities,
including the systematic genocide of orangutans. The forests of Borneo and
Sumatra are the only place where these gentle, intelligent creatures live, and
the cultivation of palm oil has directly led to the brutal deaths of thousands
of individuals as the industry has expanded into previously undisturbed areas
of rainforest. Here's the latest atrocity in Sumatra's Tripa peat forests:
http://endoftheicons.wordpress.com/
When the forest is cleared, adult orangutans are typically shot on sight. These
peaceful, sentient beings are beaten, burned, mutilated, tortured and often
eaten. Babies are torn off their dying mothers so they can be sold on the black
market as illegal pets to wealthy families who see them as status symbols of
their own power and prestige. This has been documented time and again.
If nothing is done to protect orangutans, they will be extinct in just a few
years. Visit the Orangutan Outreach website to learn more: http://redapes.org
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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