8 Ways To Find The Best Web Design Agencies For Your…Indonesian Pulpwood producer PT Mayawana Persada is continuing to clear peatlands on critical Bornean orangutan habitat, despite a government order to stop clearing.
Activists noted that these clearances happened on critical orangutan habitat and carbon-rich peatlands. In a letter dated March 28, 2024, the ministry ordered the company to stop all logging activities in logged-over areas, to focus its operation on empty degraded lands and also to restore what it has destroyed.
U.S.-based advocacy group Mighty Earth senior director for Asia and Africa, Amanda Hurowitz, calls the ministry’s letter “an example on how government can act.” This is a blatant disregard of the ministry’s order and a clear violation of the government’s peat protection rules, said Sayyidatiihayaa Afra G. Raseukiy, a policy researcher at Indonesian environmental and human rights advocacy group Satya Bumi.
Land clearing operations in PT Mayawana Persada’s concession in preparation for industrial-scale pulpwood plantation development, July 2023. Image courtesy of Auriga Nusantara.On the back of the ongoing deforestation, the NGO coalition has a clear message to the government: revoke Mayawana Persada’s licenses.
If these 6,268 hectares are cleared, the resulting emissions will amount to 344,740 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. Instead, the ministry suggested the coalition of NGOs to file a lawsuit at the state administrative court to seek for the revocation of the permits, Sayyidatiihayaa said.