YOGYAKARTA – Environmentalist from UGM, Dr. Tjut Sugandawaty Djohan, has urged Forestry Minister to stop forest conversion that makes way for palm oil industry by extending the palm oil moratorium in order to protect Indonesia’s rainforests that are now measuring to only some 33 percent or 43 millions of hectares of all Indonesia’s forests.
“In Sumatera the size of the rainforests remains 30 percent, mostly in Aceh. In Java there remains only 3%. The rainforest destruction is due to land conversion to palm oil plantation,” Tjut Sugandawaty told journalists in Faculty of Biology UGM, Friday (12/12).
She reinstated that it is not easy to bring back the land to its former use. The only way to do is to halt the chance for more land conversions and this calls for firm stance from Forestry Minister.
In the same place, Prof Noel Holmgren, lecturer of theoritical ecology from Skovde University Sweden, said ecology modelling approach can be adopted to predict natural phenomenon, even for predicting the rate of natural destruction so this would ease policy making,” he concluded.