WALHI Warns Kalimantan on Brink of Ecological Disaster as Deforestation Accelerates

Indonesian environmental advocacy network Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia (WALHI) Regional Kalimantan has warned that the island faces an ecological tipping point, with the group’s provincial chapters reporting that roughly 33.59% of Kalimantan’s ecological landscape has degraded over the past decade — an average annual tropical-forest loss of around 412,790 hectares. As reported by Mongabay Indonesia, WALHI attributes the deterioration to a dense layer of government-issued concession permits: across Kalimantan as a whole, these include 4,110 plantation land-use rights (Hak Guna Usaha, primarily for palm oil), 1,717 mining licences, and 330 forest-utilisation business permits covering timber plantations and related uses.

Province-level data from each WALHI chapter underscore the depth of the problem. In East Kalimantan, approximately 10.74 million of 12.7 million hectares — 84.36% of the province — fall under concession rights; cumulative deforestation from 2001 to 2025 reached an estimated 5.2 million hectares, with annual loss surging roughly 55% from 28,633 hectares in 2023 to 44,483 hectares in 2024. Central Kalimantan lost an estimated 56,900 hectares in 2025 alone, with about 60% of its 15.4-million-hectare territory already under large corporate control. South Kalimantan’s 2025 forest clearance is linked by WALHI to approximately 1.7 million tonnes of carbon emissions. West Kalimantan faces additional pressure from industrial activity within designated peat hydrological zones, where 135 palm-oil companies, 25 industrial timber plantation (Hutan Tanaman Industri) licences, and 123 mining permits are reported to be active. The source puts total industrial timber plantation coverage in West Kalimantan at “approximately 2.75 hectares” for 65 licence holders.

Deforestation is also widening an already volatile conflict landscape. WALHI chapters across the four Kalimantan provinces are actively supporting at least 35 tenurial disputes — eight in East Kalimantan and nine each in West, Central, and South Kalimantan — predominantly rooted in overlaps between customary community lands and concessions issued to plantation, mining, and forestry companies. Central Kalimantan alone has recorded 401 unresolved social conflicts dating to 2004. In East Kalimantan, around 65% of 1,038 villages and urban wards are encumbered by large-scale extractive concessions. WALHI officials quoted in the article argue that indigenous communities, smallholders, farmers, and fisherfolk face mounting criminalisation and dispossession, with indigenous women identified as among the most severely affected yet least publicly heard.