SAVE THE FOREST

Global Deforestation Rates

Worldwide, around 3.7 millions of hectare of natural forest is lost per year for deforestation.

This figure represents a catastrophic and accelerating loss of one of the planet's most important ecosystems. Natural forests that have taken centuries to develop are being destroyed at a pace that far outstrips any possibility of natural regeneration. The consequences extend far beyond the immediate landscape, affecting global climate systems, biodiversity, and the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people who depend on forests for their survival.

The rate of deforestation is not uniform across the globe. Tropical regions — particularly the Amazon basin in South America, the Congo basin in Central Africa, and the islands of Southeast Asia — account for the majority of current forest loss. These regions also harbour the greatest concentrations of biodiversity and the most carbon-dense forest ecosystems, making their loss particularly consequential for both the climate and for the species that depend on them.

Indonesia's Forests and Communities

In Indonesia, the rate of deforestation has improved from the past decade to about 1.08-1.80 million ha annually. While the improvement is cherished, this is not enough. The rate is still considered to be the world's fastest, about ten times of the world's average.

More than 80 millions of Indonesian depends on the forest near the forest. The biodiversity and resource rich of natural forest is the most of their livelihood source. So they literally hung their life on the forest.

The scale of forest dependency in Indonesia is difficult to overstate. From the indigenous Dayak communities of Kalimantan who have managed their forest territories for centuries, to the smallholder farmers of Sumatra who depend on forest products to supplement agricultural incomes, the link between forest health and human wellbeing is immediate and concrete. Policies that accelerate deforestation therefore carry direct human costs that are often invisible in national economic statistics.

Birds, IBAs, and Natural Production Forests

And for the birds, about 54% of the Important Bird Areas in Indonesia is outside the protected area networks. The rest is mostly on natural production forest. It is then important not to endanger the natural production forest. While the plantation forest is needed to provide timber for development, the role of natural forest is undoubtly vital.

The fact that more than half of Indonesia's Important Bird Areas lie outside formal protected areas means that conservation of these sites depends entirely on the management practices of logging concessions, community forest areas, and other productive landscapes. This places a premium on ensuring that forestry concessions are managed in ways that maintain habitat quality for birds and other biodiversity, rather than maximising extraction without regard to ecological impacts.

Sustainable forestry certification schemes, community forestry arrangements, and reduced-impact logging standards all offer potential tools for managing natural production forests in ways that retain significant biodiversity value. However, the gap between these standards on paper and their implementation on the ground remains large, and effective enforcement remains a fundamental challenge.

Natural Forest vs Plantation Forest

Natural forest is much more than tree stands. It is a complex interaction of various elements of life and non-life. It also holds so much more carbon stocks than other type of forest. With the climate change in mind, we know that natural forest is favored over plantation.

The carbon advantage of natural over plantation forest is especially pronounced when below-ground carbon is considered. The organic soils beneath natural tropical forests — particularly the deep peat soils of lowland Sumatra and Kalimantan — can store many times more carbon than the above-ground vegetation. Converting these ecosystems to oil palm or acacia plantations releases not only the above-ground carbon but also initiates a slow-burning process of peat oxidation that continues for decades.

Climate policy frameworks must therefore be designed to distinguish clearly between natural forest and plantation forest, and to ensure that incentives flow toward the protection and sustainable management of natural forest rather than its replacement with ecologically simplified plantations. REDD+ safeguards and national forest definitions are critical in this regard, as poorly constructed definitions could allow countries to claim credit for conservation while actually replacing natural forest with plantations.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the main causes of deforestation in Indonesia?+

Indonesia's deforestation has been driven by a combination of industrial and smallholder agricultural expansion, infrastructure development, and governance failures. The expansion of oil palm plantations is the most significant single driver in recent decades, with vast areas of natural forest cleared across Sumatra and Kalimantan to make way for monoculture plantations serving both domestic and export markets. The pulp and paper industry has similarly driven extensive forest clearing, particularly on peatlands in Sumatra and Riau province.

Mining operations have opened up remote forest areas, with roads built to access mineral deposits enabling subsequent agricultural encroachment. Illegal logging, facilitated by corruption within the forestry sector and inadequate law enforcement, has been a persistent problem that has stripped valuable timber from vast areas of nominally protected forest. Estimates of revenue lost to illegal logging in Indonesia run into billions of dollars annually.

Land tenure insecurity contributes significantly to the problem. In Indonesia, a substantial area of land is formally classified as state forest land, but is in practice occupied or used by local communities whose tenure rights are not formally recognised. This creates conditions in which both corporate actors and local farmers may clear forest to establish occupation claims, knowing that legal tenure is often awarded after the fact to those who have converted the land.

Underlying all of these direct drivers is a governance environment in which the economic incentives for forest conversion have historically been far stronger than those for conservation. Weak enforcement of environmental regulations, inadequate monitoring of concession boundaries, and corruption within permitting processes have created conditions in which deforestation has often been the rational economic choice for both corporate and individual actors.

How do local communities depend on forests in Indonesia?+

Indonesia is home to some of the most forest-dependent communities on Earth. More than 80 million people live in and around forests, relying on them for food, medicine, building materials, and income. For many of these communities — particularly indigenous groups in Kalimantan, Papua, and Sulawesi — the forest is not merely a resource but the foundation of their cultural identity, spiritual practices, and social organisation.

Forest products including fruits, nuts, resins, medicinal plants, and bushmeat form a critical component of the diet and nutrition of forest communities. In areas without reliable access to markets or agricultural land, forest food sources provide insurance against food insecurity, particularly during the lean season before harvests. The loss of these forest resources through deforestation or degradation can push communities into poverty and nutritional vulnerability.

Non-timber forest products also represent an important income source for many rural communities. Rattan, honey, essential oils, and other forest products are collected and sold, providing cash incomes that supplement subsistence agriculture. These forest-based livelihoods are inherently more sustainable than conversion to agriculture, as they can continue indefinitely without destroying the forest ecosystem that generates them.

The displacement of forest communities from their traditional territories — whether through conversion of forests to plantations or through the establishment of conservation areas without community consultation — carries significant human rights implications and often produces perverse conservation outcomes. Communities that have governed their forests sustainably for generations are often the most effective forest stewards, and their exclusion from management decisions undermines both the social legitimacy and ecological effectiveness of conservation.

What distinguishes natural forest from plantation forest in terms of ecological value?+

Natural forests are fundamentally different from plantations in their ecological complexity, biodiversity, and carbon storage capacity. A natural tropical forest contains hundreds or thousands of tree species, along with an intricate web of interactions among plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms that has developed over centuries or millennia. This complexity creates habitats for a vast range of species, many of which cannot survive in the simplified environment of a monoculture plantation.

The structural diversity of natural forests — with their multi-layered canopies, large standing dead trees, fallen logs, and complex root systems — provides niches for an extraordinary diversity of organisms. Forest interior specialists, many of which are endemic to specific regions, require the conditions found only in intact old-growth forest and cannot persist in the edge-dominated, structurally simple environment of young or managed forest.

Carbon storage is also substantially greater in natural forests than in plantations. Old-growth forests accumulate carbon not only in their above-ground biomass but also in below-ground roots, woody debris, and soil organic matter over long periods. Plantation forests, harvested on short rotations, never develop the large trees and accumulated dead wood that characterise the carbon-rich nature of old-growth ecosystems. Studies consistently show that natural forests store several times more carbon per hectare than the plantations that replace them.

The hydrological functions of natural forests — regulating water flow, filtering sediment, recharging aquifers, maintaining streamflow during dry seasons — are also substantially greater than those of plantations, which often have higher water use due to fast-growing species optimised for timber production. Maintaining natural forests in watersheds is therefore critical not only for biodiversity and carbon but for the water security of millions of people who depend on forest-fed rivers and springs.

What is the relationship between natural forest and carbon stocks?+

Natural forests are among the most carbon-dense terrestrial ecosystems on Earth. Tropical old-growth forests can store more than 200 tonnes of carbon per hectare when accounting for above-ground biomass, below-ground roots, and soil organic matter. Peat swamp forests in Indonesia and Malaysia are even more carbon-dense, with peat soils that can be many metres deep storing thousands of tonnes of carbon per hectare accumulated over tens of thousands of years.

The size and age structure of natural forests is critical to their carbon storage capacity. Large, old trees — the so-called "carbon giants" — store a disproportionately large share of forest carbon relative to their numbers. When a forest is logged, even selectively, the removal of these large trees causes immediate carbon losses that take decades or centuries to recover. High-grading natural forests for their most commercially valuable timber therefore inflicts significant carbon costs even when the canopy appears largely intact from above.

Below-ground carbon in forest soils and peatlands is particularly important and particularly vulnerable. Draining peatlands for agriculture exposes the organic matter to oxidation, releasing carbon continuously as long as the water table remains lowered. Peatland fires, which often follow drainage and clearing, can release enormous pulses of carbon in a very short time. Indonesia's peatland fires in 2015 released more greenhouse gases over a few weeks than the entire annual emissions of Germany.

Maintaining natural forests therefore has an irreplaceable role in climate mitigation. Even if all deforestation were halted globally, the forests already cleared would continue to release carbon from degraded soils and peatlands for decades. The priority must be to prevent further loss of the most carbon-dense natural forests while simultaneously addressing the legacy emissions from degraded landscapes through restoration.

Has the rate of deforestation in Indonesia improved in recent years?+

Indonesia's deforestation rate has fluctuated significantly over the past three decades. After reaching peak levels during the political instability following the end of the Suharto era in the late 1990s, when forest governance collapsed and illegal logging became widespread, rates declined somewhat in the early 2000s. Indonesia's engagement with REDD+ and its bilateral deal with Norway, announced in 2010, raised expectations of further sustained reductions.

Progress on implementing the commitments made under the Norway deal was slower than hoped. A moratorium on new logging permits in primary forests and peatlands, which was a central element of the Norway agreement, was repeatedly delayed and then implemented in a form that left significant areas of valuable forest unprotected. Monitoring showed that deforestation continued even in areas nominally covered by the moratorium.

One genuine and significant improvement has been the legal recognition of indigenous community forests (hutan adat) following a Constitutional Court ruling in 2013 that recognised these forests as belonging to communities rather than the state. This has gradually enabled communities to apply for formal recognition of their territories, providing stronger legal protection for forests that indigenous groups have managed sustainably for generations.

The overall picture remains concerning. While Indonesia has made real institutional progress — strengthening its forest monitoring system, expanding the One Map initiative to reduce conflicting land claims, and establishing a REDD+ agency — ground-level deforestation has continued at rates far above what the Paris Agreement implies for a country with Indonesia's forest cover. The gap between institutional progress and on-the-ground outcomes reflects deep challenges of governance, political economy, and the persistent dominance of commodity agriculture in the national development model.