Indonesia is home to 10 to 15 percent of the world’s known plants, birds, and mammals and houses the world’s largest rainforest area after the Congo and Amazon basins. The biodiversity of Indonesia’s rainforests is so abundant that it contains 12% of mammal species like tigers, orangutans, rhinos, and elephants and 17% of all known bird species. It is also home to the Tropical Rainforest Heritage of Sumatra which was named as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2004.

However, between 2002 and 2020 Indonesia has lost 36% of its total tree cover, amounting to 9.75 million hectares of its primary forests being destroyed. In 2016 alone, 929,000 hectares were lost.

Logging, land clearing and development activities are particularly significant threats to Indonesia’s forests. Peatland forests are cleared to make way for palm oil plantations, often through intentional forest fires that not only destroy the forest’s ecosystem, but also release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Scientists have concluded that 884 million tonnes of carbon dioxide were emitted from Indonesia last year, 97 percent of which originated from the forest fires. In fact, a Harvard and Columbia study showed that the life span of more than 100,000 people were affected by the massive 2015 forest fires across Indonesian rainforests.

Preserving Indonesia’s forests is critically important as it acts as one of the world’s largest carbon sinks. Indonesia’s rainforests store almost 300 billion tonnes of carbon, which is 40 times of the total greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. With your contribution, we are making sure that trees will be planted to rebuild these precious ecosystems that have suffered from such rampant damage and deforestation.