I juni forpestede en række skovbrande luftkvaliteten i Indonesien og flere nabolande. Nu viser et studie, at en fjerdedel af skovbrandene var forårsaget af palmeolie- og papirproducenter, skriver Center for Foresty Research.
BOGOR, Indonesia, 30 July, 2013: Last month’s fires on the Indonesian island of Sumatra made news headlines worldwide as they generated record-breaking air-pollution levels over neighboring Singapore and Malaysia, Forest News writes Tuesday.
Singapore’s Pollutants Standards Index (PSI) rose to an all-time high of 371 on 21 June 2013, surpassing the official “hazardous designation” of 301 or higher.
Analyses by the World Resources Institute (WRI), Eyes on the Forest, and the World Agroforestry Centre of available concession maps from official national and provincial government offices, superimposed on daily fire alerts from NASA, showed that the bulk of fire alerts occurred on lands leased out to plantation companies for the development of large industrial oil palm and acacia plantations.
There are two caveats to these analyses: NASA’s fire alerts do not indicate the shape and size of the area burned, so it is difficult to accurately determine the use of the land from these data.
More importantly, however, is that if the available maps of industrial concession boundaries for oil palm and pulpwood (acacia) plantations are different from the boundary maps held by companies, the analyses can be wrong — and many companies are arguing precisely this.
Therefore, when the ministers of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Brunei met on 17 July to find solutions to the recent haze problem, they stressed the need for Indonesia to provide detailed maps of land use and fire-affected areas.
While it might take time for detailed land-use maps to be released, here we show that it is possible to produce detailed maps of land use showing the effective area of industrial plantations and detailed fire-affected areas, using before-and-after-fire images from NASA’s recently launched LANDSAT 8 satellite.
These data show that:
– About 140,000 ha were burned during the June fire event in one LANDSAT scene (Path/Row:127/059) covering an area of 3.5 million ha (i.e. circa 7.5 percent of Sumatra’s landmass). We chose this scene because it contained the bulk of fire alerts (64% of Sumatra’s fire alerts in June were recorded in this scene) (Finding 1);
– Industrial oil palm and acacia plantations accounted for 21% of the burned area (Finding 2);
– Many industrial plantations exist on LANDSAT imagery where there are no concessions, on government maps and vice versa (Finding 3);
– Only 4% of the burned area was covered in natural forest before the fires (Finding 4).
Læs hele artiklen her: http://blog.cifor.org/18218/research-nearly-a-quarter-of-june-fires-in-indonesia-occurred-in-industrial-plantations/#.Uf9qlW3cN3l
