Indonesia: Last-Frontier Forest Is at Risk From Boom

The global resource boom is threatening one of the world’s last tropical-forest frontiers: the Merauke region of Indonesia’s remote Papua province.

Indonesian companies are lining up to develop pulp-and-paper mills in Merauke; investors from South Korea want to expand palm-oil plantations; and Indonesian officials have tried to persuade International Paper Co to invest in the region.
Merauke lies on the southern shore of Papua province, a California-size land of virgin forests and pristine rivers, with a population of 2.5 million. Because Papua is so remote, its ecology has been largely spared the kind of destruction wrought on forests in the past 25 years by pulp mills and palm-oil plantations on other Indonesian islands.

The governor of Papua pledged in December at the United Nations climate-change meeting in Bali to protect the province’s forests in return for carbon-credit financing from global investors. But these projects are likely to take years to come to fruition; meanwhile paper, palm-oil and other agricultural investors are already staking out Merauke.

Indonesia is under intense international pressure to protect its forests. Last year, Wetlands International, an environmental group, published data showing that fires set to clear forests for agriculture make Indonesia the world’s third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide behind the U.S. and China, despite its much smaller economy.

Still, record commodity prices and lack of available land elsewhere are driving investors to regions such as Papua. Environmentalists fear the area’s forests will be destroyed much like those on Sumatra and Borneo islands, where rare elephants, tigers and orangutan are threatened with extinction.

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