Fig 1.
Industrial and smallholder oil palm plantations seen by LANDSAT imagery (in 1:50,000 scale).
Imagery displayed in false colors (RGB: Near infrared; Short-wave infrared; Red). Here, closed canopy oil palm appears brown, open-canopy oil palm has different shades of yellow/orange. forest is dark brown. Recently cleared areas and newly planted areas appear bright cyan. (a) industrial plantations on a flat surface, with harvesting trails built in straight lines and thus forming rectilinear grids. (b) Young industrial plantation on hilly terrain with rectilinear borders. (c) smallholder plantations forming a mosaic with other types of landcover. (d) smallholder plantations joining together to form one large oil palm landscape. (e) Sometimes smallholder plantations owned by wealthy individuals extend several hundreds of hectares and resemble the linear structures of industrial plantations, although with less structure.
Table 1.
Share of deforestation caused by oil palm expansion from 2001 to 2019 for Indonesia and by region.
Table 2.
Oil palm expansion from 2001 to 2019 and planted area in 2019 for Indonesia and by region.
Based on three different sources: this study, a global study and government statistics.
Table 3.
Accuracy assessment of the Indonesia-wide 2019 oil palm plantation extent.
The accuracy metrics were estimated with an initial total of 3,340 reference sites randomly distributed using stratified sampling in non-forest areas and below 500 m asl. The reported metrics are: 1) the overall accuracy (OA), the user’s accuracy (UA), and the producer’s accuracy (PA) with their 95% confidence intervals, and 2) the mapped oil palm extent (industrial and smallholder) and the adjusted extent with their 95% confidence intervals.
Fig 2.
Time-series of Indonesia’s land-cover/use change from 2001 to 2019.
Expansion of oil palm plantations by year (a), split between industrial and smallholder (b,c). Forest loss (d). Mean annual Crude Palm Oil price (e). Correlations/elasticities with the previously shown land-cover change estimates (f,g). Price calculated from monthly prices in USD using IMF data [29]. In insets (a,b,c) white bars represent the areas of forest cleared and converted to plantations in the same year. This rapid conversion constitutes 29% of all forest loss detected during 2001–2019. The black bars represent areas of non-forest converted to oil palm. Ninety six percent (5.39 Mha) of those non-forest areas were non-forest in 2000, 4% (0.24 Mha) were forest cleared after 2000 and converted to plantations more slowly (after 2 to 18 years). These non-forest areas include conversion of young regrowth, mixed gardens, agroforests, and rubber plantations. Asteriks (*) indicate that the area of smallholder expansion in 2017, 2018, 2019 is likely underestimated. We note that the 2016 peak in forest loss (d) includes losses of late 2015, when fire burned large areas of forest in Kalimantan. Much of these losses were recorded only the following year by the Tree Loss dataset used to calculate forest loss because of cloud cover.
Fig 3.
Oil palm expansion from 2001 to 2019 by Indonesian region.
Y-axis represent areas (in 1000-ha, note different scales) of the total area of plantations (industrial and smallholder) added each year by rapidly clearing forests (light bars), or by using areas already cleared (dark bars). Black areas on the map represent the total 2019 oil palm area (industrial and smallholder combined).
Fig 4.
Deforestation from 2001 to 2019 and remaining forest in 2019 by Indonesian region.
Y-axis represent areas (in 1000-ha, note different scales) of forest cleared each year.