Indonesia to revoke 22 forestry permits after deadly floods

Indonesia will revoke more than 20 forestry permits across the country, the forestry minister said Monday, after deadly floods and landslides devastated parts of the northwestern island of Sumatra. 

Environmentalists and experts have pointed to the role forest loss played in flash flooding and landslides that this month killed more than 1,000 people and washed torrents of mud into villages.

The government will revoke 22 forestry permits that encompass more than one million hectares of land, forestry minister Raja Juli Antoni told reporters. 

More than 100,000 hectares covered by the cancelled permits were on Sumatra, he said, though he did not mention whether the decision was linked to the recent disaster. 

"With the addition of another one million hectares today, around 1.5 million hectares of our forests have been regulated," he said, referring to the total following his decision in February to revoke permits that encompassed around 500,000 hectares of land. 

Forests help absorb rainfall and stabilise the ground held by their roots, and their absence makes areas more prone to flash flooding and landslides. 

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Raja earlier this month signalled the disaster was a chance to "evaluate our policies" and said the "pendulum between the economy and ecology seems to have swung too far towards the economy and needs to be pulled back to the centre".

Indonesia is regularly among the countries in the world with the largest annual forest loss.

Mining, plantations and fires have caused the clearance of large tracts of the country's lush rainforest over recent decades.

Over 240,000 hectares of primary forest was lost in 2024, according to analysis by conservation start-up The TreeMap's Nusantara Atlas project. 

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