- Indonesia’s deforestation increased in 2024 to its highest level since 2021, with forest area four times the size of Jakarta lost; 97% of this occurred within legal concessions, highlighting a shift from illegal to legal deforestation.
- More than half of the forest loss affected critical habitats for threatened species like orangutans, tigers and elephants, particularly in Borneo and Sumatra.
- Key industries driving deforestation include palm oil, pulpwood, and nickel mining, with significant deforestation in Kalimantan, Sumatra and Papua; a new pulp mill in Kalimantan in particular may be driving aggressive land clearing.
- Despite an existing moratorium on new forest-clearance permits, there’s no protection for forests within existing concessions, allowing continued deforestation, and spurring calls for stronger policies to safeguard remaining natural forests.
JAKARTA — Indonesia’s deforestation is once again rising after several years of decline, with 2024 marking the highest rate since 2021. The data also show that the vast majority of forest loss is legal, a stark difference from previous periods dominated by illegal deforestation.
The country lost 261,575 hectares (646,366 acres) of forests, an area four times the size of Jakarta. That’s up 1.6% from 2023, according to data from environmental NGO Auriga Nusantara, which has been monitoring the country’s forest cover for years.
“While it’s only 4,000 hectares [nearly 10,000 acres] of increase [in forest loss], it’s still a worrying trend,” Auriga Nusantara director Timer Manurung told Mongabay. “At a time when natural forests [in Indonesia] keep shrinking, this number is still significant.”
This increase after years of declining deforestation shows how the government has failed to protect the country’s remaining forests, estimated at less than 90 million hectares (222 million acres), according to official data, Timer said.
While the government has issued a number of forest protection policies, they’re aimed mainly at restricting the issuance of new concessions for plantations and other commercial activities that involve clearing forests. But there’s no policy to protect the remaining stands of forest that lie within existing concessions that have already been granted by the government, Timer said.
In fact, the government incentivizes companies to clear forests within their concessions once they have the permits to do so, and punishes them for not doing so fast enough by rescinding the concessions and awarding them to other developers.
As a result, there’s been a noticeable shift in the deforestation trend: from illegal deforestation that occurs outside concessions, to legal deforestation inside concessions, permitted and encouraged by the government, Timer said.
The shift has been stark: 97% of the deforestation that Auriga Nusantara recorded in 2024 occurred within legal areas, such as concessions and infrastructure projects.
“We often hear that Indonesia’s deforestation is declining. But it turned out that what’s declining is illegal deforestation,” Timer said. “It’s shifted to legal deforestation, because our regulations don’t protect remaining natural forests.”
The increase in deforestation is especially alarming for wildlife, as more than half of the 2024 forest loss, 160,925 hectares (397,654 acres), occurred in habitat for species such as orangutans, tigers, elephants and rhinos, all of which are critically endangered.
At 108,100 hectares (267,121 acres), Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) habitat was the most heavily impacted by deforestation, suggesting that the continued clearing of forests is disproportionately affecting their survival.
Ade Tri Ajikusumah, head of the Ministry of Forestry’s planning department, said the Auriga Nusantara data differs from official deforestation data released by the ministry due to different forest monitoring methodologies. He said that while Auriga Nusantara focuses on forest loss, the government includes reforestation efforts in plantation forests in its calculations, leading to a lower net deforestation figure.
The ministry identified 216,215 hectares (534,279 acres) of forest loss and 40,778 hectares (100,765 acres) of reforestation in 2024, resulting in 175,437 hectares (433,514 acres) of net deforestation — a figure that’s a third smaller than that calculated by Auriga Nusantara.
Despite the ongoing deforestation, Ade said Indonesia is doing comparatively well in protecting its forests.
“Despite Indonesia’s large population, the country has managed to maintain over 50% of its forest cover, which is a notable achievement compared to other countries,” he told Mongabay.
Sumatra
Much of the deforestation last year was concentrated on Sumatra and Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo. Forest loss across both islands increased significantly, so much so that it offset the decline of deforestation that happened in the rest of the country.
Both Sumatra and Kalimantan have long been the epicenter of industrial-scale forest clearing for activities such as oil palm plantations, pulpwood estates, and coal mines. Until 2013, Sumatra was the island with the highest deforestation rate in Indonesia, before the deforestation frontier shifted eastward, to Borneo and the islands of Sulawesi and, increasingly, Papua.
Yet forest loss in Sumatra in 2024 was 91,248 hectares (225,479 acres), or nearly triple the rate in 2023, making the island the No. 2 spot for deforestation, after only Kalimantan. Much of this is the result of palm oil companies clearing more land within their concessions to expand their plantations, as well as illegal plantations encroaching into forests.
Timer cited the example of Rawa Singkil Wildlife Reserve, an ostensibly protected area, in Sumatra’s northern province of Aceh. This crucial habitat for Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) continues to suffer from illegal oil palm expansion. It’s a similar case for Tesso Nilo National Park in Riau province, another protected area that has been heavily encroached upon for illegal oil palm plantations.
While deforestation for oil palms has declined in recent years, the plantation industry remains a major driver of forest loss in the country, contributing to 14% of the total deforestation in 2024.
And palm-driven deforestation could be set to increase, with President Prabowo Subianto encouraging the plantation industry to expand into forests by saying “we don’t need to be afraid of deforestation” because oil palms are trees too, Timer said.
“His statement about ‘no need to be afraid of deforestation’ is very dangerous,” he said.
Kalimantan
Another cause for alarm is what’s happening in Kalimantan, which has been the biggest deforestation hotspot in Indonesia for more than a decade.
Timer said deforestation there is often overlooked because of the perception that the bulk of land-clearing activities have shifted to eastern Indonesia, which still has large swaths of intact rainforests. Yet Kalimantan accounted for nearly half of Indonesia’s total deforestation in 2024, at 129,896 hectares (320,980 acres) of forest, a 4% increase from 2023.
“I’m worried that we will lose the forests in Kalimantan in front of our eyes because we suddenly shift [our attention] toward [places like] Papua,” Timer said.
In Kalimantan, deforestation is mostly driven by three industries: pulpwood, mining and palm oil. Together, they accounted for more than half of the deforestation across the island.
Industrial forest
Pulpwood plantations — vast estates of acacia or eucalyptus that are grown to produce pulp and paper — account for the most of what’s known as industrial forest concessions. In 2024, these concessions became the largest driver of deforestation in Indonesia, overtaking palm oil.
The majority of deforestation in industrial forest concessions occurred in Kalimantan. And unlike oil palm deforestation, which is small in scale but spread across a large number of concessions, deforestation in industrial forest concessions is concentrated in a small number of concessions. That’s because these concessions are dominated by a handful of conglomerates, whereas oil palm plantations involve far more companies.
The biggest single instance of deforestation in an industrial forest concession last year occurred in the Kalimantan concession of the company PT Mayawana Persada. That loss of 6,145 hectares (15,185 acres) of forest in its concession, which largely overlaps with Bornean orangutan habitat, made Mayawana Persada the single biggest deforester in Indonesia last year.
Auriga Nusantara said there were indications that the increase in pulpwood-driven deforestation was linked to increased demand from a new pulp mill in Tarakan district, North Kalimantan province, run by the company PT Phoenix Resources International.
The mill is expected to process millions of cubic meters of wood per year, meaning that massive land clearing is required to establish plantation feedstock, Timer said. That’s going to keep pushing pulpwood companies in the region to clear forests aggressively to be able to supply enough wood, he added.
“What’s dangerous about this new pulp mill is that we don’t know who owns it and thus we don’t know where it’s buying its timber from,” he said.
According to civil society and media reports, the new pulp mill is affiliated with Singapore-based paper and palm oil conglomerate Royal Golden Eagle (RGE). RGE, however, has denied any connection to the Tarakan mill.
Another driver for the increase in deforestation in Kalimantan is the government’s wood pellet program, which it insists is a renewable energy initiative — despite having to clear rainforest for the “energy plantations” of fast-growing tree species from which the pellets are produced.
The government has set a target of replacing up to 10% of the coal in power plants with wood pellets, a practice known as cofiring. But given that coal accounts for the majority of Indonesia’s electricity generation, this would require clearing at least 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of forest for energy plantations, an area twice the size of the island of Bali, according to a 2022 analysis by clean energy think tank Trend Asia.
Nickel mining
Outside of Sumatra and Kalimantan, however, the rest of Indonesia experienced a decline in deforestation rates.
Papua, for instance, saw its total deforestation in 2024 drop by 69% from the previous year, to 17,341 hectares (42,851 acres). The island of Sulawesi also experienced a 53% decline in deforestation during the same period.
Despite this, however, the situation in Sulawesi remains very concerning as it has fewer swaths of intact rainforest compared to the other islands to begin with, Auriga Nusantara noted. Here, nickel mining is the main driver of deforestation.
Nickel mining is also expanding into Papua, particularly in the archipelago of Raja Ampat. Mining has already begun on four small islands in Raja Ampat, and two others have been permitted for mining. On the Papuan mainland, a new nickel mining permit has been issued in the district of Sarmi, where 99% of the concession is primary forest, meaning inevitable deforestation.
Nickel-driven deforestation is escalating as Indonesia seeks to exploit its world-leading reserves of the metal to establish itself as a major player in the electric battery industry.
Call to action
With Indonesia’s forests continuing to be cleared at a large scale, President Prabowo Subianto should immediately issue a regulation to protect the remaining natural forests, Timer said.
Ade from the forestry ministry said the government already has a number of such policies, such as a moratorium on issuing new permits to clear primary and peat forests, as well as ongoing law enforcement against illegal deforestation — never mind that illegal deforestation accounted for just 3% of the total deforestation in 2024.
As for the moratorium, according to Timer, it doesn’t apply to clearing forests within existing concessions, which is why legal deforestation persists. It also doesn’t apply to secondary forests, even though they’re still considered natural forests.
Data from MapBiomas, a collective of researchers who map changes in land use, shows the moratorium only covers 52.9 million hectares (130.7 million acres) of natural forests in Indonesia, out of a total of 94.9 million hectares (234.5 million acres).
This means that there are 42 million hectares (103.8 million acres) of natural forests not protected by either the moratorium or any other forest protection policies. Of these, 9 million hectares (22.2 million acres) are located inside concessions, meaning they can be cleared at any time.
“That’s why we ask the president to immediately issue a presidential regulation for the protection of remaining natural forests,” Timer said. “That’s if he has the intention to protect [forests].”
Banner image: Deforestation caused by nickel mining of PT Kawei Sejahtera Mining in Kawei, a small island in the Raja Ampat archipelago, West Papua, Indonesia. Image taken in December 2024 by Auriga Nusantara.
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