YOGYAKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesia’s environment minister on Monday rebuffed conservationists who want the government to add secondary forests to its moratorium on issuing new licenses to use land designated as primary forest.
Announced in May 2011, the first two-year moratorium was applauded as an important step in reducing deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions, and it has been extended three times.
Environmental groups like Greenpeace and the World Resources Institute have urged the government to strengthen and extend the ban to include secondary forests — areas that were cleared, but where woody vegetation has again taken over.
Minister of Environment and Forestry Siti Nurbaya Bakar has told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that extending the moratorium to secondary forests could undermine the country’s economic development goals.
“We have to think about it, because Indonesia has a huge population and we’re still in the progress of developing,” she said.
Bakar said the government’s main priority is assessing which land may be licensed for development, while deciding on the designation of secondary forests may come later.
“Secondary forests are a secondary priority,” she said.
Home to the world’s third-largest tropical forests, Indonesia is also the biggest palm oil producer. Environmentalists blame much of the forest destruction on land clearance for the crop.
The 2011 moratorium was part of a $1 billion deal with the Norwegian government to help Indonesia reduce forest clearing. By November 2016, the moratorium covered an area of more than 66 million hectares.
But deforestation and forest fires continue to blight many parts of the country, while revisions to the moratorium have lacked transparency, according to environmental campaigners.
The exemption of secondary forests and patchy law enforcement have hindered the moratorium’s progress, they say.
Forest cover loss in Indonesia remains high, according to the Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) lab at the University of Maryland.
Peaking in 2012 at 928,000 hectares, forest cover loss dropped to about 500,000 hectares in 2013 before increasing in 2014 and 2015 to 796,500 hectares and 735,000 hectares, respectively, according to GLAD.
Despite this, last year Bakar called for a permanent moratorium on issuing new licenses to use land designated as primary forest and peatland.
