Land clearing for palm oil plantations jeopardises Indonesia’s climate commitments, harms rural communities: report

Human Rights Watch points out that weak governance in the forestry and plantation sectors is putting at risk Jakarta’s pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

It also found palm oil expansion led to land conflicts, some of which involved the removal of land from villagers without replacement or adequate compensation

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A girl holds palm oil fruit collected from a plantation in Sumatra, Indonesia. Photo: AP

Published: 11:20pm, 11 Jun 2021Updated: 8:02am, 15 Jun 2021

The clearing of natural forests for the expansion of palm oil plantations in Indonesia is putting its commitment to reducing emissions at risk, according to a new report, while also causing the loss of land and livelihoods among the country’s rural communities.

While the Southeast Asian nation has made much progress in reducing forest fires since the great blazes of 1997-98, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report points out that land grabs and the destruction of peatlands are continuing, threatening to derail Jakarta’s environmental efforts.

“If weak governance in the forestry and plantation sectors is not adequately addressed, Indonesia risks failing to deliver on its domestic and international commitments to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while also exacerbating human rights problems,” HRW said in the June 3 report, titled “Why Our Land?”.

On a visit to Indonesia last week, United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) president-designate Alok Sharma urged the country to set out a pledge to achieve net zero emissions by the middle of the century in order to prevent catastrophic impacts from the climate crisis.

During a joint press briefing with Sharma, Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar outlined a plan for Indonesia to be carbon neutral in the forestry sector by 2030. “This sector could even store over 140 million tons of carbon emissions,” she was quoted as saying by The Jakarta Post.

Esther Tamara, a foreign policy and climate analyst with the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia – an independent, non-political body – said the target was “an ambitious plan that we all support, but we must take a realistic view of what’s happening on the ground”.

Baby snakes killed in a peatland forest fire are pictured at a palm oil plantation in Pekanbaru, Riau province, in 2019. Photo: AFP

She said even though deforestation had hit a historic low last year, an area the size of Jakarta had been intentionally cleared since 2019 – and to reach the government’s target, a maximum of 4.82 million hectares of land could be deforested between 2010 and 2030.

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