JAKARTA — Deforestation by the palm oil industry in Indonesia increased in 2023 for the second year in a row, bucking a decade of gradual decline, according to an analysis by technology consultancy TheTreeMap. Palm oil companies in Indonesia, the world’s top producer of the commodity, cleared 30,000 hectares (about 74,100 acres) of forest last year to make way for plantations, up from 22,000 hectares (54,400 acres) in 2022. These increases mark the end of a declining trend that began after the record 227,000 hectares (561,000 acres) — an area nearly twice the size of Los Angeles — of deforestation in 2012. Expansion of industrial oil palm plantations in Indonesia by year from 2001 to 2023 with emphasis on forest conversion. White bars represent the oil palm-driven deforestation or the areas of forest cleared and converted to plantations in the same year. The black bars represent areas of non-forest converted to oil palm. The sum of white and black bars represents the area of plantation added each year. Here, ‘Forest’ is old-growth, high carbon and high conservation value. ref to Gaveau et al. 2022 for methods and definitions. France-based TheTreeMap used plantation concession data from Greenpeace to identify 53 companies behind the plantation expansion and resulting deforestation, of which 20 had cleared carbon-rich peatlands. The single biggest deforester was the company Ciliandry Anky Abadi (CAA), whose three subsidiaries deforested 2,302 hectares (5,688 acres) across their concessions. A recent investigation by The Gecko Project has linked CAA to Indonesian conglomerate First…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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