JAKARTA — After years of declining deforestation, forest loss caused by Indonesia’s pulp sector is on the rise again, showing a fivefold increase in 2022 compared with 2017 levels, a new analysis shows. In the 1990s and 2000s, Indonesia’s pulp and paper industry was among the country’s primary drivers of deforestation. Since 2001, the industry had established 3 million hectares (7.41 million acres) of plantations and cleared a million hectares (2.47 million acres) of forest in the process. In recent years, in light of public pressure, an increasing number of producers and buyers of wood pulp and paper have adopted zero-deforestation commitments, notably two of the country’s largest producers: Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), a subsidiary of conglomerate Sinar Mas group, and Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings Limited, a subsidiary of the Royal Golden Eagle (RGE) group, in 2013 and 2015, respectively. The corporate commitments to stop deforestation were followed by dramatic declines in deforestation, with the average deforestation rate falling by 85% when comparing the three-year average for 2017-19 and 2010-12, according to data from Trase, a supply chain transparency initiative. However, wood pulp-driven deforestation started to rise again beginning in 2017, spiking nearly fivefold between 2017 and 2022, according to the analysis by Trase, which used satellite data from the forest loss monitoring platform TheTreeMap. The uptick in deforestation is likely to be driven by an increase in wood consumption, as pulp and paper producers are building and operating new mills to meet a surge in global demand…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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