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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20851278

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cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/31992348

Deforestation in Indonesia rose in 2024 for a third year running, a local environmental NGO said Friday, based on satellite image analysis and fieldwork.

A government official disputed the figures, saying they mischaracterised deforestation in the country.

Indonesia has one of the world's highest rates of deforestation, with key drivers including timber plantations, palm oil cultivation and, increasingly, the mining of critical minerals.

Its rainforests are some of the world's most biodiverse, providing crucial habitats for threatened and endangered species, and are key carbon sinks.

The report by NGO Auriga Nusantara said 261,575 hectares (646,366 acres) of primary and secondary forests across Indonesia were lost in 2024, over 4,000 more than the previous year.

The vast majority of the losses took place in areas opened for development by the government, the group added.

"It is worrying, as it shows the increase of legal deforestation," said Auriga Nusantara's chair Timer Manurung.

He called for "urgent" protection of forest in Kalimantan, where the highest losses were recorded as the country's new capital is built, and in Sulawesi.

Ade Tri Ajikusumah, a senior official at Indonesia's environment and forestry ministry, said the deforestation figure failed to account for replanting.

He acknowledged that government figures for "gross" deforestation in 2024 are "not significantly different" from Auriga Nusantara's, but that the NGO did not account for reforestation of over 40,000 hectares.

"We are now working to maximise land use," he said, adding that development around Indonesia's new capital involves "land that has already been released from forest status".

"These areas were previously managed by companies under existing permits. So it's not deforestation -- it was already designated for development."

The report comes as Indonesian environmentalists raise alarm over government plans to convert millions of hectares of forests for food and energy use.

President Prabowo Subianto, who assumed office in October, has pledged to boost food and energy self-sufficiency, including by expanding bio-based fuels to lower fuel imports.

Environmental groups warn the plans would spell disaster for the country's forests.

"We ask President Prabowo to issue a presidential regulation to protect all remaining natural forest," Timer told AFP.

The report is based on satellite imagery, which was analysed to confirm deforestation, and followed up with field visits to areas representing tens of thousands of hectares of forest loss, Auriga Nusantara said.

While deforestation occurred in all of Indonesia's provinces except the region around Jakarta, the biggest losses were in Kalimantan.

One driver has been the designation of an area for the new capital, the report said.

Two regional governments in the area have proposed opening up hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest to potential development, the group warned.

Most deforestation however was driven by commodities, including timber, mining and palm oil.

Auriga Nusantara said its count excluded loss in timber plantations and plantation forest, but does cover both primary forests and regenerated "secondary" forest.

The report also sounds the alarm on deforestation for biomass production, which has seen forest levelled to plant quick-growing species that will provide wood biomass.

Indonesia is keen to boost domestic use of biomass energy and export, particularly to Japan and South Korea.

And it highlighted deforestation on islands in Raja Ampat, an area known for its teeming coral reefs, as nickel mining advances.

"This area of such national and international acclaim has been unable to withstand the onslaught," the report said.

Nearly 200 hectares across four islands in the region have been deforested, the group said, with new nickel mining licences already issued for several more islands.

Auriga Nusantara said forest loss was also happening in conservation areas, despite legal protections.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20816028

Umphang (Thailand) (AFP) – Scientist Inna Birchenko began to cry as she described the smouldering protected forest in Thailand where she was collecting samples from local trees shrouded in wildfire smoke.

"This beautiful, diverse community of trees and animals is being destroyed as you see it, as you watch it," she said.

Birchenko, a geneticist at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, was collecting seeds and leaves in Umphang Wildlife Sanctuary with colleagues from Britain and Thailand.

They will study how temperature and moisture affect germination and whether genetics dictate those responses.

That may one day help ensure that reforestation is done with trees that can withstand the hotter temperatures and drier conditions caused by climate change.

But in Umphang, a remote region in Thailand's northwest, the scientists confronted the toll that human activity and climate change are already having on forests that are supposed to be pristine and protected.

Birchenko and her colleagues hiked kilometre after kilometre through burned or still-smouldering forest, each footstep stirring up columns of black and grey ash.

They passed thick fallen trees that were smoking or even being licked by dancing flames, and traversed stretches of farmland littered with corn husks, all within the sanctuary's boundaries.

The wildlife for which the sanctuary is famous -- hornbills, deer, elephants and even tigers -- was nowhere to be seen.

Instead, there were traces of the fire's effect: a palm-sized cicada, its front neon yellow, its back end charred black; and the nest of a wild fowl, harbouring five scorched eggs.

"My heart is broken," said Nattanit Yiamthaisong, a PhD student at Chiang Mai University's Forest Restoration and Research Unit (FORRU) who is working with Birchenko and her Kew colleague Jan Sala.

"I expected a wildlife sanctuary or national park is a protected area. I'm not expecting a lot of agricultural land like this, a lot of fire along the way."

The burning in Umphang Wildlife Sanctuary is hardly an outlier.

Wildfires are common in Thailand during the country's spring burning season, when farmers set fields alight to prepare for new crops.

Some communities have permission to live and farm plots inside protected areas because of their long-standing presence on the land.

Traditionally, burning has helped farmers enrich soil, and fire can be a natural part of a forest's ecosystem. Some seeds rely on fire to germinate.

But agricultural burning can quickly spread to adjacent forest -- intentionally or by accident.

The risks are heightened by the drier conditions of climate change and growing economic pressure on farmers, who are keen to plant more frequently and across larger areas.

Experts warn that forests subjected to repeated, high-intensity fires have no chance to regenerate naturally, and may never recover.

Fire data based on satellite images compiled by US space agency NASA shows hotspots and active fires burning across many protected areas in Thailand over recent weeks.

Around tourist hotspot Chiang Mai, firefighting helicopters drop water on local wildfires, at a cost of thousands of dollars per mission.

But remote Umphang is far from the public eye.

Park rangers protect the area, but they are frequently underpaid, poorly resourced and overstretched, local environmentalists say.

It's a long-standing problem in Thailand, whose Department of National Parks has sometimes closed protected areas in a bid to prevent fires from spreading. The department did not respond to AFP requests for comment.

And the challenge is hardly unique to Thailand. Devastating blazes have ravaged wealthy California, Japan and South Korea in recent months.

Still, it was a sobering sight for Sala, a seed germination expert at Kew.

"The pristine rainforest that we were expecting to see, it's actually not here any more, it's gone," he said.

"It really shows the importance of conservation, of preserving biodiversity. Everything is being deforested at a very, very high speed."

Sala and Birchenko work with Kew's Millennium Seed Bank, which holds nearly 2.5 million seeds from over 40,000 wild plant species.

They want to "unlock" knowledge from the seed bank and help partners like FORRU, which has spent decades working out how to rebuild healthy forests in Thailand.

The partnership will map the genetic structure and diversity of three tree species, predict their resilience to climate change, and eventually delineate seed zones in Thailand.

"We hope that some of the population will be more resilient to climate change. And then... we can make better use of which populations to use for reforestation," said Sala.

Back in Britain, seeds will be germinated at varying temperatures and moisture levels to find their upper limits.

Genetic analysis will show how populations are related and which mutations may produce more climate-resilient trees.

But first the team needs samples.

The scientists are focusing on three species: albizia odoratissima, phyllanthus emblica -- also known as Indian gooseberry -- and sapindus rarak, a kind of soapberry tree.

The three grow across different climates in Thailand, are not endangered and have traditionally been used by local communities, who can help locate them.

Still, much of the search unfolds something like an Easter egg hunt, with the team traipsing through forest, scanning their surroundings for the leaf patterns of their target trees.

"Ma Sak?" shouts Sala, using the local name for sapindus rarak, whose fruits were once used as a natural detergent.

It's up to FORRU nursery and field technician Thongyod Chiangkanta, a former park ranger and plant identification expert, to confirm.

Ideally seeds are collected from fruit on the tree, but the branches may be dozens of feet in the air.

A low-tech solution is at hand -- a red string with a weight attached to one end is hurled towards the canopy and looped over some branches.

Shaking it sends down a hail of fruit, along with leaves for Birchenko to analyse. Separate leaf and branch samples are carefully pressed to join the more than seven million specimens at Kew's herbarium.

The teams will collect thousands of seeds in all, carefully cutting open samples at each stop to ensure they are not rotten or infested.

They take no more than a quarter of what is available, leaving enough for natural growth from the "soil seed bank" that surrounds each tree.

Each successful collection is a relief after months of preparation, but the harsh reality of the forest's precarious future hangs over the team.

"It's this excitement of finding the trees... and at the same time really sad because you know that five metres (16 feet) next to the tree there's a wildfire, there's degraded area, and I assume that in the next years these trees are going to be gone," said Sala.

The team is collecting at seven locations across Thailand, gathering specimens that are "a capsule of genetic diversity that we have preserved for the future", said Birchenko.

"We are doing something, but we are doing so little and potentially also so late."

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20816028

Umphang (Thailand) (AFP) – Scientist Inna Birchenko began to cry as she described the smouldering protected forest in Thailand where she was collecting samples from local trees shrouded in wildfire smoke.

"This beautiful, diverse community of trees and animals is being destroyed as you see it, as you watch it," she said.

Birchenko, a geneticist at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, was collecting seeds and leaves in Umphang Wildlife Sanctuary with colleagues from Britain and Thailand.

They will study how temperature and moisture affect germination and whether genetics dictate those responses.

That may one day help ensure that reforestation is done with trees that can withstand the hotter temperatures and drier conditions caused by climate change.

But in Umphang, a remote region in Thailand's northwest, the scientists confronted the toll that human activity and climate change are already having on forests that are supposed to be pristine and protected.

Birchenko and her colleagues hiked kilometre after kilometre through burned or still-smouldering forest, each footstep stirring up columns of black and grey ash.

They passed thick fallen trees that were smoking or even being licked by dancing flames, and traversed stretches of farmland littered with corn husks, all within the sanctuary's boundaries.

The wildlife for which the sanctuary is famous -- hornbills, deer, elephants and even tigers -- was nowhere to be seen.

Instead, there were traces of the fire's effect: a palm-sized cicada, its front neon yellow, its back end charred black; and the nest of a wild fowl, harbouring five scorched eggs.

"My heart is broken," said Nattanit Yiamthaisong, a PhD student at Chiang Mai University's Forest Restoration and Research Unit (FORRU) who is working with Birchenko and her Kew colleague Jan Sala.

"I expected a wildlife sanctuary or national park is a protected area. I'm not expecting a lot of agricultural land like this, a lot of fire along the way."

The burning in Umphang Wildlife Sanctuary is hardly an outlier.

Wildfires are common in Thailand during the country's spring burning season, when farmers set fields alight to prepare for new crops.

Some communities have permission to live and farm plots inside protected areas because of their long-standing presence on the land.

Traditionally, burning has helped farmers enrich soil, and fire can be a natural part of a forest's ecosystem. Some seeds rely on fire to germinate.

But agricultural burning can quickly spread to adjacent forest -- intentionally or by accident.

The risks are heightened by the drier conditions of climate change and growing economic pressure on farmers, who are keen to plant more frequently and across larger areas.

Experts warn that forests subjected to repeated, high-intensity fires have no chance to regenerate naturally, and may never recover.

Fire data based on satellite images compiled by US space agency NASA shows hotspots and active fires burning across many protected areas in Thailand over recent weeks.

Around tourist hotspot Chiang Mai, firefighting helicopters drop water on local wildfires, at a cost of thousands of dollars per mission.

But remote Umphang is far from the public eye.

Park rangers protect the area, but they are frequently underpaid, poorly resourced and overstretched, local environmentalists say.

It's a long-standing problem in Thailand, whose Department of National Parks has sometimes closed protected areas in a bid to prevent fires from spreading. The department did not respond to AFP requests for comment.

And the challenge is hardly unique to Thailand. Devastating blazes have ravaged wealthy California, Japan and South Korea in recent months.

Still, it was a sobering sight for Sala, a seed germination expert at Kew.

"The pristine rainforest that we were expecting to see, it's actually not here any more, it's gone," he said.

"It really shows the importance of conservation, of preserving biodiversity. Everything is being deforested at a very, very high speed."

Sala and Birchenko work with Kew's Millennium Seed Bank, which holds nearly 2.5 million seeds from over 40,000 wild plant species.

They want to "unlock" knowledge from the seed bank and help partners like FORRU, which has spent decades working out how to rebuild healthy forests in Thailand.

The partnership will map the genetic structure and diversity of three tree species, predict their resilience to climate change, and eventually delineate seed zones in Thailand.

"We hope that some of the population will be more resilient to climate change. And then... we can make better use of which populations to use for reforestation," said Sala.

Back in Britain, seeds will be germinated at varying temperatures and moisture levels to find their upper limits.

Genetic analysis will show how populations are related and which mutations may produce more climate-resilient trees.

But first the team needs samples.

The scientists are focusing on three species: albizia odoratissima, phyllanthus emblica -- also known as Indian gooseberry -- and sapindus rarak, a kind of soapberry tree.

The three grow across different climates in Thailand, are not endangered and have traditionally been used by local communities, who can help locate them.

Still, much of the search unfolds something like an Easter egg hunt, with the team traipsing through forest, scanning their surroundings for the leaf patterns of their target trees.

"Ma Sak?" shouts Sala, using the local name for sapindus rarak, whose fruits were once used as a natural detergent.

It's up to FORRU nursery and field technician Thongyod Chiangkanta, a former park ranger and plant identification expert, to confirm.

Ideally seeds are collected from fruit on the tree, but the branches may be dozens of feet in the air.

A low-tech solution is at hand -- a red string with a weight attached to one end is hurled towards the canopy and looped over some branches.

Shaking it sends down a hail of fruit, along with leaves for Birchenko to analyse. Separate leaf and branch samples are carefully pressed to join the more than seven million specimens at Kew's herbarium.

The teams will collect thousands of seeds in all, carefully cutting open samples at each stop to ensure they are not rotten or infested.

They take no more than a quarter of what is available, leaving enough for natural growth from the "soil seed bank" that surrounds each tree.

Each successful collection is a relief after months of preparation, but the harsh reality of the forest's precarious future hangs over the team.

"It's this excitement of finding the trees... and at the same time really sad because you know that five metres (16 feet) next to the tree there's a wildfire, there's degraded area, and I assume that in the next years these trees are going to be gone," said Sala.

The team is collecting at seven locations across Thailand, gathering specimens that are "a capsule of genetic diversity that we have preserved for the future", said Birchenko.

"We are doing something, but we are doing so little and potentially also so late."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22397825

Summary

Denmark will convert 15% of its farmland into forests and natural habitats over the next 20 years to combat fertilizer runoff, which has caused severe oxygen depletion in Danish waters and marine life loss.

The $6.1 billion plan includes planting 1 billion trees and acquiring farmland, addressing emissions from agriculture, Denmark’s largest greenhouse gas source.

The initiative supports Denmark’s 2030 goal to cut emissions by 70% from 1990 levels and makes it the first country to impose a carbon tax on agriculture under its Green Tripartite agreement.