The map underpinning Indonesia’s moratorium on new concessions in primary forests and peatlands is “inaccurate”, an Indonesian forestry official told The Jakarta Post.
Forestry Ministry secretary-general Hadi Daryanto said the estimate that the moratorium would cover 64 million hectares of primary forest was inaccurate. He said that lack of current satellite data impeded the process of classifying forest.
“The accuracy is not essential for an indicative map [on the forest moratorium],” he was quoted as saying by The Jakarta Post.
“We will revise it [the map] every six months, if there are findings with scientific proof.”
Click image to enlarge (Greenpeace analysis February 2011)
The revelation came as Greenomics Indonesia, an activist group, reported that nine blocks of forest categorized by the government as primary forest are actually secondary forest.
Other analysis has found that some existing protected areas — including Sumatra’s Bukit Tigapuluh and Tesso Nilo — are conspicuously absent from the map.
Environmentalists have criticized the coarse scale of the map, which is 1:19 million. The Forestry Ministry says it will soon publish a 1:250,000-scale map.
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