About

About Kepo Hutan

This interactive map, produced using technology provided by Maphubs, is designed as a tool to help anyone with a special interest in Indonesia’s forests and their governance by the government, companies and other stakeholders.

Indonesia's forests and peatlands are of vital global importance due to their unique biodiversity, the livelihoods they support, and their role in maintaining a stable climate. We have a short window of opportunity to limit global temperature increases to less than 1.5ºC and prevent at least one million species becoming extinct.

The expansion of Indonesia’s palm oil and pulp and paper plantation industries have far-reaching impacts for our entire planet. Converting tropical forest and peatlands into agricultural land releases huge volumes of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, and increases the risk of catastrophic fires. The destruction of these natural landscapes also pushes countless species towards the brink of extinction.

Indonesia’s government and agricultural companies must take responsibility for their role in the climate and biodiversity crises, preventing further destruction and repairing the damage already caused.

Increasing transparency

The map’s primary function is to provide greater transparency about who controls areas of land and what happens within it. Previously, this information has not been publicly available to this extent despite the strong public interest case for such openness. Only when there is full transparency on land tenure, both civil society and government bodies will we be able to end the destruction of the forests and peatlands, and the damage caused to Indonesia’s people and economy.

The devastating fires which swept across Indonesia towards the end of 2015 were the result of decades of forest degradation, deforestation and peatland drainage by companies involved in clearing land for plantations, in logging or mining. The World Bank estimated the fires cost the Indonesian economy 221 trillion rupiah (US$16.1bn). But fires occur annually – each year, there are on average 110,000 premature deaths across Southeast Asia caused by the fires and the associated haze.

Our map sets the standard for transparent and meaningful public access to information on land use and land-use change. But it is not perfect. The concession maps were compiled from multiple sources, including paper maps and PDFs which had to be converted into scalable digital maps in shapefile format suitable for analysis. It is also not up-to-date – although the active fires and monthly clearance alerts are frequently updated, most of the concession data are already a few years old. We invite all stakeholders to help us improve them.

However, what is really needed is for the government to make the most recent data on concessions freely accessible as shapefiles so they can be easily analysed alongside other data, such as forest cover, peatland depth, or fire and clearance alerts.

Unless such maps are available, stakeholders from local communities to government enforcement agencies and consumer companies will be unable to hold to account those responsible for continued forest destruction.

Disclaimer

Concession, land cover and moratorium area maps presented on this platform are unofficial copies from various sources (see respective map information for details). Official data are not currently available due to restrictions imposed by the Government of Indonesia.

To enable users to analyse data by overlaying different maps in layers, vector (shapefile) maps are required. For some maps, this required manual digitization of maps only available in JPG or PDF format, which may have resulted in minor differences compared to the original maps. Greenpeace Indonesia invites all stakeholders to provide corrections to these maps by contacting our Jakarta office and/or by emailing steam@greenpeace.org with ‘Kepo Hutan’ in the email subject.

Greenpeace provides no guarantee of the accuracy of these maps and warns against use of these maps for any financial or other important decisions. Their use is at the user’s own risk.