Who is clearing Indonesia’s forests — and why?

JAKARTA — While most tropical countries experienced record-high deforestation rates in 2024, Indonesia’s forest loss is slowing, bucking a global trend.

But beneath the headline figures lies a troubling mystery: Nearly half of the forest cleared last year can’t be linked to any identifiable driver, raising red flags about speculative land clearing, regulatory blind spots and delayed environmental harm.

This uncertainty complicates supply chain accountability under laws like the EU Deforestation Regulation, and raises questions about who’s really clearing Indonesia’s forests — and why.

In 2024, Indonesia lost 242,000 hectares (598,000 acres) of primary forest, down 14% from 279,000 hectares (689,000 acres) in 2023, according to an analysis by TheTreeMap, a technology consultancy behind the Nusantara Atlas forest monitoring platform.

TheTreeMap used satellite and time-series imagery to attribute deforestation to known drivers. They are logging (18%), industrial oil palm (13%), pulpwood/timber plantations (6%), mining (5%), food estate projects (3%) and fires (2.3%).

Together, these drivers explain just 47.3% of Indonesia’s 2024 primary forest loss — leaving the majority unattributed, which experts say reflects both data limitations and deeper governance failures.

What explains this gap in attribution? A likely reason is that land is cleared but not immediately used.

A study published in 2024 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that nearly half of all deforested land in Indonesia remained idle for at least five years — meaning it wasn’t converted to plantations, agriculture or any observable land use.

These areas are often eventually converted to agriculture — usually oil palm — but the long delay obscures who cleared the land and why, TheTreeMap noted.

There are many examples of these across Indonesia, said Timer Manurung, the director of the environmental NGO Auriga Nusantara.

In Riau and Bengkulu provinces on the island of Sumatra, for example, natural forests in some selective logging concessions have been cleared, and yet the permit owners seem to have abandoned the concessions.

As a result, oil palm investors moved in years later and began planting, Timer said.

The deeper roots of idle land

While nearly half of Indonesia’s primary forest loss in 2024 remains unexplained, experts say this absence of clear attribution is not simply a data gap — it may be a warning sign of deeper governance issues.

One leading explanation is speculative clearing, when companies clear forests without immediately converting the land to plantations or infrastructure. According to Arief Wijaya, managing director of World Resources Institute (WRI) Indonesia, this pattern has persisted since the 1990s, when companies obtained forestry or plantation permits, extracted valuable timber and left the land idle. In many cases, this was deliberate: either a lack of capital to proceed or part of a long-term land banking strategy.

These behaviors point to regulatory failure, as the issue of abandoned land is closely tied to the “reckless issuance of permits” by the government, said Boy Jerry Even Sembiring, the director of the Riau chapter of the country’s largest green group, Walhi.

Concession holders face few consequences for clearing forest and abandoning the land, creating a cycle of destruction without accountability. The result is a patchwork of degraded forestland, legal ambiguity and lost oversight — fertile ground for future land conflict, encroachment, opportunistic development and fires.

In an effort to address this, Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry earlier this year revoked 18 inactive forestry concessions covering more than 526,000 hectares (1.3 million acres). Minister Raja Juli Antoni framed the move as part of a broader push to reclaim unproductive concessions and reassert state control over idle forestland.

But Arief warned that the recent revocations barely scratch the surface.

“If we look at the broader picture, this land speculation has been happening for over 30 years,” he told Mongabay.

Without a systematic approach to identify, map and resolve the status of idle lands, the problem will persist — quietly fueling environmental degradation, sparking community conflict and undermining efforts to clean up supply chains, Arief said.

Once land is cleared and left idle, communities often move in and begin farming, sometimes triggering future land disputes, especially when the land is later contested by concession holders or targeted for development, he added.

Idle land is also prone to fires, activists say.

Boy of Walhi Riau said abandoned lands consistently burn during the dry season.

“After being cleared, they [idle lands] often burn, yet there’s no proper accountability or follow-up review process for these incidents,” he said.

Turning idle land into opportunity

Therefore, Arief called on the government to come up with a targeted and comprehensive strategy.

The first order of action is to map where the idle lands are and identify their owners and jurisdictions. If during the mapping it turns out that communities have already controlled the land and conflicts have emerged, then the government needs to resolve the conflicts first, Arief said.

After that, the government and other stakeholders should develop a plan for how to use these lands — whether through rehabilitation, community use or reallocation, he said.

One option is to mandate the rehabilitation of the idle lands, if they are located within concessions.

Yuliusman, the director of Walhi South Sumatra, said concession owners need to be held responsible for the land they control, including when these lands are cleared and burned.

That’s why the government needs to make land ownership data available to the public so landowners can be held accountable, he said.

Another option is to grant communities rights to manage these idle lands through the social forestry scheme.

The program, initiated by President Prabowo Subianto’s predecessor, former President Joko Widodo, is one of the largest socioenvironmental experiments of its kind, aiming to reallocate 12.7 million hectares (31.4 million acres) of state forest to local communities and give them the legal standing to manage their forests.

By granting social forestry permits to communities with a clear business plan, the government could empower small farmers while bolstering food security at the same time, Arief said.

This aligns with the platform of Prabowo, who has prioritized achieving both food and energy self-sufficiency as cornerstones of his administration, he added.

Since his election campaign in late 2023 and early 2024, Prabowo has emphasized the need for Indonesia to achieve sovereignty in these critical sectors to bolster economic resilience and national security.

In December 2024, Minister Raja Juli announced the government had identified 20 million hectares (50 million acres) of forest area for potential conversion into “food and energy estates.”

The announcement raised concerns over new deforestation, especially if the areas include intact forests. But Arief said the plan could be positive — if those hectares are truly idle lands that have already been cleared and remain unproductive.

“If we already know there are 20 million hectares of low-productivity land, and we have a food security program, then we can map which crops are suitable — maybe some areas for rice paddies, others for water conservation, others for energy,” he said. “That’s where we need a road map.”

Recognizing the rights of communities to manage their lands could also help prevent fires, according to Rod Taylor, the global director of WRI’s forests program.

“I think some of the success in Indonesia [in mitigating fires] can be put down to really good collaboration between companies and communities, to not only prepare for big fires and a lot of enforcement of no burning laws, but also really fast response mechanism to spot and take action against fires before they can spread too far,” he said.

Having a road map that puts community rights at the forefront is also critical to resolving lingering land conflicts, said Timer of Auriga Nusantara.

It’s also necessary to address Indonesia’s deep-rooted structural injustice in land ownership. Today, 68% of the country’s land is controlled by just 1% of the population, as the state prioritizes concessions to large corporations over community land rights.

These large-scale infrastructure and resource extraction projects have pushed marginalized groups such as farmers, Indigenous communities and fisherfolk off of their lands.

Between 2015 and 2024, more than 3,200 agrarian conflicts broke out across 7.4 million hectares of land (18.3 million acres) — affecting 1.8 million households.

Timer warned against using the existence of idle land as a pretext to expand industrial agriculture, which he said would only deepen Indonesia’s land conflicts.

“We must avoid justifying the planting of monoculture commodities on deforested land in the name of ‘what’s already happened,’” he said. “If these areas must be converted, then they should be turned into social forestry zones — and owned by local communities, not corporations.”

Citation:

Parker, D., Tosiani, A., Yazid, M., Sari, I. L., Kartika, T., Kustiyo, … Hansen, M. C. (2024). Land in limbo: Nearly one third of Indonesia’s cleared old-growth forests left idle. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(28). doi:10.1073/pnas.2318029121

Banner image: Peatlands destruction in Riau, 2014. While Indonesia has in the past been a major carbon emitter due to land-use change, deforestation, forest fires and peatland destruction, the recent decline in deforestation is seen as a positive sign. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

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Hans Nicholas Jong Editor

This story first appeared on Mongabay

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