The Oxford Academic - Geophysical Journal International published the article The 2006 July 17 Java (Indonesia) tsunami from satellite imagery and numerical modelling: a single or complex source? by H. Hébert, P.-E. Burg, R. Binet, F. Lavigne, S. Allgeyer, and F. Schindelé, on 1st December 2012.
Earth sciences are part of the new frontier for ensuring the habitability of our planet for human survival. This study shows how the application of satellite sourced information, together with computer based modelling, is capable of producing new boundaries of explanation and understanding of geophysical processes.
To quote from the Summary:
Using high-resolution satellite imagery (SPOT 5 and Quickbird), the coastal impact of the tsunami is refined in the surroundings of the high-security Permisan prison on Nusa Kambangan island, where 20 m run-up had been recorded directly after the event. These data confirm the extreme inundation lengths close to the prison, and extend the area of maximum impact further along the Nusa Kambangan island (about 20 km of shoreline), where inundation lengths reach several hundreds of metres, suggesting run-up as high as 10–15 m.
Tsunami modelling has been conducted in detail for the high run-up Permisan area (Nusa Kambangan) and the PLTU power plant about 25 km eastwards, where run-up reached only 4–6 m and a video recording of the tsunami arrival is available. For the Permisan prison a high-resolution DEM was built from stereoscopic satellite imagery. The regular basin of the PLTU plant was designed using photographs and direct observations. For the earthquake's mechanism, both static (infinite) and finite (kinematic) ruptures are investigated using two published source models. The models account rather well for the sea level variation at PLTU, showing a better agreement in arrival times with the finite rupture, and predict the Permisan area to be one of the regions where tsunami waves would have focussed. However, the earthquake models that match the data at PTLU do not predict that the wave heights at Permisan are an overall maximum, and do not predict there more than 10 m of the 21 observed. Hence, our results confirm that an additional localized tsunami source off Nusa Kambangan island, such as a submarine landslide, may have increased the tsunami impact for the Permisan site. This reinforces the importance for hazard assessment of further mapping and understanding local potential for submarine sliding, as a tsunami source added to usual earthquake sources.
Flooded zones in the vicinity of riverbeds evidenced on the Quickbird and SPOT5 scenes.
Google Earth
This Google Earth image of our blue planet is a synthesis of visual information derived from satellite technologies and is, essentially, an engineered information construction using overlays of layers of data sourced from NASA and the USGS's Landsat 8 satellite. Google Earth's imagery is displayed on a digital globe, which displays the planet's surface using a single composited image from a far distance. After zooming in far enough, the imagery transitions into different imagery of the same area with finer detail, which varies in date and time from one area to the next. The imagery is retrieved from satellites or aircraft. Before the launch of NASA and the USGS's Landsat 8 satellite, Google relied partially on imagery from Landsat 7, which suffered from a hardware malfunction that left diagonal gaps in images. In 2013, Google used datamining to remedy the issue, providing what was described as a successor to the Blue Marble image of Earth, with a single large image of the entire planet. This was achieved by combining multiple sets of imagery taken from Landsat 7 to eliminate clouds and diagonal gaps, creating a single "mosaic" image. Google now uses Landsat 8 to provide imagery in a higher quality and with greater frequency.
Every image created from Google Earth using satellite data provided by Google Earth is a copyrighted map. Any derivative from Google Earth is made from copyrighted data which, under United States Copyright Law, may not be used except under the licenses Google provides. Google allows non-commercial personal use of the images (e.g. on a personal website or blog) as long as copyrights and attributions are preserved. By contrast, images created with NASA's globe software World Wind use The Blue Marble, Landsat, or USGS imagery, each of which is in the public domain.
Our shared image of planet Earth has much to do with the work of NASA in the 1960's.
The first colour image of Earth was a composite of images taken in 1967 by the ATS-3 satellite, and was used as the cover image of the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog.
And the Whole Earth Catalog is referenced in the article a blue planet that contains a NASA video of the Apollo mission that produced probably the most influential of the LIFE Magazines 100 Photographs that Changed The World.The Re:LODE Methods & Purposes page has a link to an article Through the Vanishing Point that explains the environment/anti-environment situation:
Essentially, the situation is like this:
The planet Earth is enveloped by an information environment. This envelope functions in a similar way to the frame of an artwork. So the planet itself becomes an artwork.
The planet is not a readymade. It is being made, and re-made, all of the time . . .
On the back of The Last Whole Earth Catalog
there is this epitaph:
We can't put it together.It is together.
The Last Whole Earth Catalog was published in 1971. The cover photo of the "whole Earth" was taken on board Apollo 4 in 1967. The tragedy is that, as the epitaph says, the Earth is "together" but is not the same "together" as it was in 1967. Over the fifty year period from this photo capturing the planet as a crescent Earth so much has been lost and so much has been accumulated. What has been lost is forest. What has been accumulated is carbon dioxide.
The Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, U.S. calculates that since 1751 a total of 1578 gigatons of CO
2 have been emitted from the consumption of fossil fuels, and that more than half of this total amount, 820 gigatons, has been emitted since 1989.
Q. What does a gigaton of CO2 look like?A. When it comes to our gigatons of carbon dioxide emitted each year, NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory has done some fascinating math (which starts with a relatively simple conversion of gigatons of carbon dioxide into gigatons of carbon):
Q. Who is emitting these gigatons of CO2?In 2010 about 9 Giga-tons of Carbon (GtC) were emitted from burning fossil fuels as 33 Giga-tons of CO2 gas.How much is 9 Giga-ton? 9 billion tons or 9,000,000,000,000,000 grams, or 19,800,000,000,000 pounds.Can you imagine…9 Giga-tons is the weight of about 132 billion people. The amount of carbon we are putting into the atmosphere each year is equal to 20 times the weight of the current world population.
All of which further underscores that the gigaton is the unit that really explains to you how we’re altering the planet — changing its atmosphere, and changing its oceans, at a scale that’s hard for humans to conceive of. Net gigatons of CO
2 are going into the atmosphere and net gigatons of H
2O are going into the ocean. And if you wanted to reshape a planet, it’s hard to think of a better recipe than that.
A. If we look at emission levels country by country, it looks like this!
Countries by carbon dioxide emissions in thousands of tonnes per annum, via the burning of fossil fuels (blue the highest and green the lowest).
These are the total CO2 emissions per nation.
However if you look at the darkest blue countries, China and the United States of America, they appear to be the two most extreme sources of carbon emissions, but their individual per capita carbon footprints are, in fact, worlds apart. According to the Wikipedia article List of countries by carbon dioxide emissions, the figure for the USA per capita for fossil carbon emissions is 15.7 whereas in China it's 7.7 which is less than half of the U.S. per capita impact. This is because this total carbon emission has a per capita average set against the much larger Chinese population in comparison to the United States.
Peatland fires in Indonesia
Indonesia fires seen from a million miles away in 2015!
Phil Plait writes October 27, 2015
This image of Earth from space should be beautiful and tranquil, but humanity’s ugly influence can be seen. Photo by NASA
Normally, I think pictures of Earth from space are among the most beautiful of all astronomical photos. Our home is gorgeous, especially when seen from afar.
But Monday, NASA tweeted a picture of our world whose ugliness made me literally gasp when I understood what I was seeing.
The photo above is from the Earth-observing DSCOVR satellite, which sits 1.5 million km (almost a million miles) over our planet, taking full-disk images every hour, which are then put online for the public to view. That shot was taken on Oct. 25 at 05:37 UTC. NASA put the picture on Twitter to point out the three tropical low systems developing in the Indian Ocean. Which is great, and very cool. But what caught my eye was the huge grayish hazy patch over Indonesia, over to the right a bit.
It took me a moment to figure it out, but then it hit me: That’s smoke from the Indonesian peat bog fires that are raging out of control right now. Fires in these peatlands have been going off and on for years, but 2015 is on track to be the second largest on record (after 1997). There have been nearly 100,000 active fires recorded there in this year alone.
A closer look. The smoke can be seen as gray, twisting plumes on the right. Photo by NASA
These fires are dumping vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide and methane. According to GlobalFireData.org, the fires this year have tripled Indonesia’s CO2 output, emitting as much as the entire country of Japan did in 2013.
On Monday, President Obama met with Indonesian President Joko Widodo, and they talked about these fires.* Indonesia is the fifth largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, and these fires aren’t helping. Worse, many of these fires are set purposefully to clear for agriculture, but the El Niño has worsened them significantly.
The total amount emitted from these fires just this year is over a gigaton, a billion tons, of CO2. Globally, humans put out about 40 gigatons of CO2 per year, so this is a staggering amount.
As your eyes can show you. These fires can literally be seen from a million miles away.
The satellite that generated the images used in Phil Plait's article is the The Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR. It was originally developed as a NASA satellite proposed in 1998 by then-Vice President Al Gore for the purpose of Earth observation.
In 1991, following his son's serious accident involving a car collision incident, Al Gore decided not to run for the presidency in 1992. However, during this period he worked on the text for his book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, published in June 1992, shortly before he was elected Vice President in the 1992 presidential election.
Known by the short title Earth in the Balance, the book explains the world's ecological predicament and describes a range of policies to deal with the most pressing problems. It includes a proposed "Global Marshall Plan" to address current ecological issues.
As Vice President Al Gore championed the satellite project. Originally known as Triana, named after Rodrigo de Triana, the first of Columbus's crew to sight land in the Americas, the satellite's original purpose was to provide a near-continuous view of the entire Earth and make that live image available via the Internet.
Al Gore hoped not only to advance science with these images, but also to raise awareness of the Earth itself, updating the influential Blue Marble photograph taken by Apollo 17.
In addition to an imaging camera, a radiometer would take the first direct measurements of how much sunlight is reflected and emitted from the whole Earth (albedo). This data could constitute a barometer for the process of global warming. The scientific goals expanded to measure the amount of solar energy reaching Earth, cloud patterns, weather systems, monitor the health of Earth's vegetation, and track the amount of UV light reaching the surface through the ozone layer.
In 1999, NASA's Inspector General reported that "the basic concept of the Triana mission was not peer reviewed", and "Triana's added science may not represent the best expenditure of NASA's limited science funding". The Bush Administration put the project on hold shortly after George W. Bush's inauguration. Members of the U.S. Congress asked the National Academy of Sciences whether the project was worthwhile. The resulting report, released March 2000, stated that the mission was "strong and scientifically vital".
Triana was removed from its original launch opportunity on STS-107 (the ill-fated Columbia mission in 2003). The $100 million satellite remained in storage for the duration of the Bush administration. In November 2008 the satellite was removed from storage and began recertification for a possible launch on board a Delta II or a Falcon 9.
Phil Plait takes up the story on his blog: Bad Astronomy
The Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, was launched into space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in February 2015. It was placed into position about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, in a direction toward the Sun. This spot, called the Lagrange 1 (or just L1) point is a special location: There, a balance exists between the gravity of Earth and Sun, as well as the outward centrifugal force of the space probe’s orbital motion.
More simply: If you put something there, it tends to stay there.
It’s not that simple but close enough for the moment. And that’s where DSCOVR sits, with its back to the Sun, and its Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) pointed at our fair and fully sunlit planet. This camera is connected to a 30.5 cm (12”) telescope and can take images in 10 different colors, which are then downlinked (beamed back) to Earth about once per hour. These can be combined to form natural-color shots of the Earth, which are then uploaded to the website.
The spacecraft’s mission is to monitor our climate as well as various other physical processes that affect it. A side benefit is incredibly beautiful portraits of Earth, and indeed that was one of the reasons Vice President Al Gore wanted this satellite built in the first place. We communicate with words, but pictures smooth their passage considerably.
Anyway, I love this idea. Making these images public and easy to access means people can fool around with them, create animations, see what the Earth looked like at a given time. I imagine this will be useful in classrooms. What lessons can be created around these views?
And, given the main point of DSCOVR’s mission, what lessons will we all learn?
In the 2017 documentary An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, Al Gore speaks of the history of the DSCOVR satellite and its relation to climate change.
There is a troubling lesson to learn from the timeline of this history when it comes to emissions of CO
2 since Al Gore published Earth in the Balance in 1992, and his ongoing championing of the DSCOVR, finally launched in early 2015, and his 2017 documentary.
Over 50% of the total 1578 gigatons of carbon emissions since 1751 have been emitted since 1989, a massive 820 gigatons.
Repeat - 820 gigatons of global carbon emissions since 1989 represents over 50% of the historic global carbon emissions of 1578 gigatons that have been released since 1751!
Globally, deforestation accounts for about 12% of carbon emissions, and forest fires produce as much as 25%. The impact of peatland forest fires can be even more intense. Peatland fires in Indonesia in 1997 released up to 2.6 billion tons of carbon amounting to 40% of the average annual global emissions level.
The 1997 Indonesian forest fires were caused by changing land use which made the tropical forest vulnerable to fire during a drought associated with that year's El Niño. Indonesian forests have historically been resistant to burning even during long dry seasons and despite the use of fire to clear land for swidden agriculture.
Slash and burn fires in Sumatra 14 October 2004
Swidden, or slash-and-burn agriculture, also called fire-fallow cultivation, is a farming method that involves the cutting and burning of plants in a forest or woodland to create a field called a swidden. The method begins by cutting down the trees and woody plants in an area. The downed vegetation, or "slash", is then left to dry, usually right before the rainiest part of the year. Then, the biomass is burned, resulting in a nutrient-rich layer of ash which makes the soil fertile, as well as temporarily eliminating weed and pest species. After about three to five years, the plot's productivity decreases due to depletion of nutrients along with weed and pest invasion, causing the farmers to abandon the field and move over to a new area. The time it takes for a swidden to recover depends on the location and can be as little as five years to more than twenty years, after which the plot can be slashed and burned again, repeating the cycle.
The land use changes that led to the fires were a combination of industrial-scale logging, draining peatlands for conversion to oil palm and fast-growing tree plantations, and a massive government program to drain swamps and convert them to rice paddies. A total of 240 people perished in the wildfires.
When it comes to carbon emissions there are NO boundaries, NO frontiers!
Fires blazing in Kalimantan and Sumatra in Indonesia have created epic palls of smoke visible to the Himawari-8 satellite between October 14 and 22 of 2015. The fires, mostly to clear land for agricultural purposes, have been releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each day, on average, than the entire economy of the United States.
Research use of satellites!
The Global Fire Emissions Database mission statement says:
Fires are an important source of atmospheric trace gases and aerosols and they are the most important disturbance agent on a global scale. In addition, deforestation and tropical peatland fires and areas that see an increase in the frequency of fires add to the build-up of atmospheric CO2.
We have combined satellite information on fire activity and vegetation productivity to estimate gridded monthly burned area and fire emissions, as well as scalars that can be used to calculate higher temporal resolution emissions. Most of the resulting datasets are downloadable from this website for use in large-scale atmospheric and biogeochemical studies.
Funding for GFED is provided by:
- NASA funding to Randerson, Morton, Andela, and Giglio.
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF#3269) funding to Randerson and Morton
- The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) Vici grant to van der Werf
A good example of environmental news gathering research is Mongabay.
Mongabay.com is a web site that publishes news on environmental science, energy, and green design, and features extensive information on tropical rainforests, including pictures and deforestation statistics for countries of the world. It was founded in 1999 by economist Rhett Ayers Butler in order to increase "interest in and appreciation of wildlands and wildlife, while examining the impact of emerging local and global trends in technology, economics, and finance on conservation and development". In recent years to complement its US-based team, Mongabay has opened bureaus in Indonesia, Latin America, and India, reporting daily in Indonesian, Spanish, and English respectively. Mongabay's reporting is available in nine languages.
The name of the website, according to the Wikipedia article, originated from an anglicized spelling and pronunciation of Nosy Mangabe, an island off the coast of Madagascar. Butler, the founder of the site, goes on to note in an interview with Conjour, that it is best known as "a preserve for the Aye-aye, a rare and unusual lemur famous for its bizarre appearance". Is this an example of the Mondegreen phenomenon?
In an article headlined Deforestation accelerates in Indonesia, finds Google forest map, Butler cites the work of Matt Hansen et al. High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change. SCIENCE VOL 342 15 NOVEMBER 2013. He also points to the use of data based on the rendering of 650,000 NASA Landsat images by Google Earth Engine, a computing cloud run by the Internet giant, and is published as a comprehensive database represented as an interactive global forest map. The tool is freely available at: Global Forest Change
Rhett A. Butler published this article on 14 November 2013, and that, as in all the data gathered and presented across the website, is an example of how information can be mobilized to help us see what is actually happening. Mongabay.com is independent and unaffiliated with any organization, but site has been used as an information source by CNN, CBS, the Discovery Channel, NBC, and UPI. The website also reflects Butler's passion for rainforests drove him to start Mongabay:
"I was intrigued by the complexity of these ecosystems and how every species seemed to play a part. As I became more passionate about rainforests, I grew more concerned about their fate, including the threats they face."Butler writes this article, using satellite generated data as visual evidence:
Forest loss in Indonesia has sharply risen over the past 12 years, reports a new study published in the journal Science.
The study, led by Matt Hansen of University of Maryland, finds that Indonesia lost 15.8 million hectares between 2000 and 2012, ranking it fifth behind Russia, Brazil, the United States, and Canada in terms of forest loss. Some 7 million hectares of forest regrew during the period.
But of the top five forest countries, Indonesia had by far the highest percentage rate of forest loss at 8.4 percent. By comparison, Brazil lost only half as much on a proportional basis.
98 percent of the archipelago’s forest loss occurred in dense forest areas in Sumatra and Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), where industrial tree plantations and oil palm estates have rapidly proliferated over the past 20 years. Riau Province was particularly hard hit, as an animation released by the authors shows:
Deforestation is also on the rise in the country. In 2011/2012 forest loss reached the highest level since the late 1990’s despite a nationwide ban on new concessions in 65 million hectares of primary forest areas, peatlands, and protected areas. The data suggests the forestry moratorium, which was implemented as part of the country’s commitment to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, may be failing to deliver as hoped.
The results are a stark contrast to numbers released earlier this year by Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry, which claimed that deforestation has fallen on an annual basis since 2005/2006. But the difference between the estimates could be partly methodological — the Ministry of Forestry estimate ignores deforestation on land outside the area it manages and excludes conversion of natural forest to timber plantations, which are classified as "forest."
Note: Hansen et al’s data includes all “forest cover” including plantations and natural forests, while MoF data only incorporates change in forest cover within Indonesia’s Forest Estate, a zone managed by MoF. Hansen’s “forest loss” data would thus include replanting of timber and oil palm plantations.
At this point in the article Butler introduces the new data base:
The new data, which is based on the rendering of 650,000 NASA Landsat images by Google Earth Engine, a computing cloud run by the Internet giant, is published as a comprehensive database represented as an interactive global forest map.
Hansen, who has published a number of papers on deforestation trends, says he hopes the map can help countries develop better policies for reducing forest loss.
“This is the first map of forest change that is globally consistent and locally relevant,” Hansen said in a statement. “Brazil used Landsat data to document its deforestation trends, then used this information in its policy formulation and implementation. They also shared these data, allowing others to assess and confirm their success.”
“Such data have not been generically available for other parts of the world. Now, with our global mapping of forest changes every nation has access to this kind of information, for their own country and the rest of the world.”
The tool is freely available at earthenginepartners. appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest.
Butler then adds a link to a later article to clarify some questions relating to this new tool and the methods employed in its application: Clarifying Google's forest map.
The map does not distinguish between natural forests and plantations, but the underlying database will support the development of additional layers, which can be used to create masks for oil palm and timber plantations, enabling users to distinguish between deforestation, replanting of plantations, and conversion of forests to plantations.
The forest map released last week by a team of remote-sensing experts has produced some confusion — and criticism — over exactly what it shows.
The map provides a global assessment of forest cover defined “strictly biophysically”, according to Peter Potapov, one of the authors of the paper that describes the dataset underlying the map. It counts areas with trees of 5 meters tall or higher as “forests”, meaning that natural forests are treated equally as plantations, including most timber and oil palm plantations.
Therefore “forest loss”, as measured by the tool, doesn’t not necessarily reflect deforestation. In some cases “forest loss” may represent replanting of existing plantations, especially in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia where acacia, eucalyptus, and oil palm plantations are replanted on regular cycles. For timber plantations, this cycle might be every 6-8 years. For oil palm plantations, the cycle is typically 20-30 years, depending on the quality of the stock, yields, and palm oil prices.
View of forest loss in Indonesia, 2000-2012, with a zoomed in look at Central Kalimantan, where oil palm plantations are being rapidly developed.
While the inclusion of plantations have led some to declare the map meaningless or an instrument of propaganda, the utility of the tool goes well beyond mapping forest cover. For one, the dataset is the first to offer global coverage on a consistent and timely basis. Unlike the Food and Agriculture Organization’s reports that come every five years and rely on notorious spotty self-reporting from forestry departments, the map will be updated on an annual basis using standardized methodology. Furthermore, the data, once published next year, will be freely accessible via the web and presented in an interactive format.
More importantly, the availability of the data will enable other parties to develop “layers” that sit atop the forest map. For example, concession data will allow researchers to mask plantation areas, disaggregating oil palm and timber estates from natural forests and enabling accurate summation of deforestation rates on an annual basis. Similarly, spatial data on indigenous reserves and protected areas will help policymakers understand the effectiveness of various conservation approaches. Data on roads, oil and gas exploration blocks, fire history, logging concessions, and mining operations can all be used to create mash-ups with the forest map, providing insight on drivers of deforestation.
So in other words, the new map serves as a strong foundation for many applications to come. These applications will help humanity better understand and assess what it is doing to the planet’s forests.
Regional subsets of 2000 tree cover and 2000 to 2012 forest loss and gain. (A) Paraguay, centered at 21.9°S, 59.8°W; (B) Indonesia, centered at 0.4°S, 101.5°E; (C) the United States, centered at 33.8°N, 93.3°W; and (D) Russia, centered at 62.1°N, 123.4°E. Image and caption courtesy of Science
CITATION: Matt Hansen et al. High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change. SCIENCE VOL 342 15 NOVEMBER 2013
Update
Agencia EFE, S.A., a Spanish international news agency, the major multimedia news agency in the Spanish language and the world's fourth largest wire service after the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse, ran this story by Ricardo Pérez-Solero Banda Aceh, Indonesia16 May 2019.INDONESIA DEFORESTATION
Activists use satellites to detect illegal oil palm plantations in Indonesia
The battle against illegal oil palm plantations on the Indonesian island of Sumatra is being fought hundreds of kilometers above ground through orbiting satellites that manage to penetrate the veil of secrecy of those involved in the rapid deforestation ravaging the island's bustling ecosystems.
The European Union and countless non-profits consider the cultivation of oil palms the prime cause of deforestation in the world's two main palm oil-producing countries, Malaysia and Indonesia. There is a growing call by activists for greater transparency amid the reluctance of authorities and corporations to make information about these plantations public.
One of the endangered areas is Sumatra's Leuser Ecosystem, a huge rainforest region spanning over 2.6 million hectares populated by protected species including elephants, rhinos and tigers.
Projects such as NASA's Landsat 8 and the European Space Agency's Sentinel 2 programs, along with the satellites from the United States-based company Planet Labs or the University of Maryland's Global Forest Watch initiative, allow environmental organizations to survey nearly 90 percent of this ecosystem from Low Earth Orbit.
Agung Dwinurcahya, an activist working for the anti-deforestation group Haka, said the organization would take legal measures when it detected a forest area loss of more than five hectares or if it found a protected species was being threatened.
"The government has its own deforestation data, but the latest hasn't been published yet. We only have it for 2017," Agung told EFE while showing off the advanced geographic information tools used by the group inside a café in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh, located in the west of Sumatra.
The loss of forest has caused an increase in natural disasters such as floods, avalanches and droughts, the activist said.
The Gunung Leuser National Park, which covers almost 8,000 square kilometers (3,089 square miles), is a UNESCO world heritage site and is one of the most biodiverse areas on the Indonesian archipelago.
In 2018, the province of Aceh lost more than 15,000 hectares of forest. This is a smaller than the 21,000 hectares that were destroyed in 2015, which, according to Anung, indicates that the security forces were starting to take environmental crimes more seriously.
Although the destruction of primary rainforests is at its lowest level since 2003 in Indonesia, it still placed third among countries that lost the greatest amount of rainforest (340,000 hectares) in 2018, according to the World Resources Institute.
Local police and nearly 1,800 rangers in Aceh are hampered by a scarcity of resources, while the government has systematically made access to information about agricultural concessions more difficult, both at the local and national level.
Agung said that a coalition of activists had filed a complaint against the country's agriculture ministry and the national land agency back in March for violating the 2008 Law on Public Information Transparency.
Meanwhile, the coordinating minister for economic affairs, Darmin Nasution, defended the need to keep information about oil palm plantation concessions confidential in order to uphold the national economic interest.
In Aceh, Haka forwards the evidence collected by the satellites to the organization Forum Konservasi Leuser, which documents the situation on the ground – both in-person and through drones – and takes the most significant cases to court.
Out of a total of 5,000 deforestation cases handled last year, the FKL took 80 of them to court, of which 55 percent ended in a warning to the accused and only 18 percent resulted in jail sentences and fines.
Many of those who are caught tend to return the land to the State voluntarily, while others prefer to sue, which in some instances can lead to the court-mandated felling of the oil palm trees.
Tezar Fahlevi, an FKL activist, said that roads actually represented the biggest threat to the ecosystem because they were the gateway to illegal activities in mining, plantations or felling, and were not properly supervised by the government.
"If the government could increase the number of officers tasked with guarding and patrolling these areas, I'm positive the number of illegal activities would decline," he said.
Tezar told EFE that he was working on a case concerning an 80-hectare oil palm plantation located in a natural reserve that allegedly belongs to a member of Aceh's legislative chamber.
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