In a judgement handed down in 2017, a court ruled that the Indonesian government must unveil their maps showing what land use has been decided where.
The government is still fighting.
It is odd that they are still fighting. In recent years there have been multiple problems where plantations have seemingly been given permission in areas that are also set aside for nature.
This is obviously impossible – forest cannot both be destined to be razed to the ground so it can be replanted with crop trees, and at the same time be left standing for the benefit of wildlife that lives there.
If the government published mapping, the policing would become extraordinarily simple. With the huge and growing number of satellites taking pictures, deforestation could be noted within hours of starting. This could then be compared to the governments zoning mapping, and so illegal deforestation could be stopped within days of starting.
The current government is lead by Jair Bolsonaro. I have written about him multiple times in the past. His priority seems to be to turn most of the Amazon rainforest into crops and plantations, so he is intentionally stymieing the effort to fight deforestation. We can only hope that in the election next year, he fails in his re-election bid. Given his horrific record on Covid with the third highest number of cases, and the second highest number of deaths, you would hope that his chances of re-election would be slim. Unfortunately, looking at Trumps re-election bid (they have similar approaches) and despite his errors how close he came to succeeding, we cannot take defeat as a given. Indeed, at the current time Bolsonaro is on track to get succeed and get a second term. Currently, despite his, frankly criminal, mishandling of the Covid outbreak the population his popularity has not suffered. Unfortunately, a different group has not managed to put together a coalition that might be able to start building some momentun.
