Half of Indonesia's deforestation occurs outside concession areas

Originally shared by Environmental Investigation Agency

Half of Indonesia's deforestation occurs outside concession areas

Roughly half of Indonesia's natural forest loss occurs outside officially designated concession areas, concludes a new assessment that also finds higher deforestation rates in places with worse forest governance scores.

The report, released last month by Forest Watch Indonesia, is based on analysis of satellite data spanning the archipelago. Unlike assessments by the Ministry of Forestry, the data includes areas outside the "forest estate".

The findings are sobering, showing that Indonesia's forest cover is now down to 46 percent of its land mass, a drop of 2.5 percentage points since 2009. Natural forest cover in Indonesia now amounts to 82.5 million hectares, more than half of which exists in just three provinces: Papua in Indonesian New Guinea, East Kalimantan (including North Kalimantan), and West Kalimantan.

Forest Watch Indonesia's analysis concludes that Indonesia averaged 917,000 ha of natural forest per year between 2009 and 2013, well above the figure cited by the Ministry of Forestry. More than three-fifths of that loss occurred in Kalimantan and Sumatra.

Full story on Mongabay.com at http://news.mongabay.com/2015/0106-fwi-indonesia-deforestation.html

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Image: Ancestral forests devastated for oil palm plantation in Sorong, West Papua (c) EIA