40% of lowland forests in Sumatra and Indonesian Borneo cleared in 15 years

By Rhett A. Butler, www.mongabay.com
November 10, 2009 Forty percent of lowland forests in Sumatra and Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) were cleared from 1990 to 2005, reports a high resolution assessment of land cover change in Indonesia. The research, conducted by Matthew Hansen of South Dakota State University, and colleagues, found that Indonesia lost 21.35 million hectares (82,400 square miles) of forest during the period. Deforestation peaked in the 1990-2000 period (averaging 1.78 million hectares per year) before plunging around the turn of the century. Forest clearing has since crept up on a year-by-year basis, reaching 1 million hectares in 2005, but at 0.71 million hectares per year for the 2000-2005 period, remain below the 1990s rate. Seventy percent of deforestation was concentrated in Sumatra and Borneo, the only islands that still house native orangutan populations. The assessment is based on targeted sampling of remote sensing data that the authors say provides better accuracy than estimates from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the conventional source for forest cover estimates. FAO figures are based on satellite imagery and self-reported data from countries but have been widely criticized. …