Gee, someone buy APP a round of beers - out of two million hectares felled every year - EVERY YEAR - in Indonesia, they've chosen to protect 34,000. Why, that's a whole 3.2% of one year's cut!
JAKARTA (AFP) - One of the world's largest pulp and paper companies, Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), said it will set aside a tract of its forest concession in Indonesia's Sumatra island for conservation. The Singapore-based company "has now agreed to set aside more than 85,000 acres (34,000 hectares) of forest for conservation," APP said in a press release.
Indonesia is estimated to be losing nearly two million hectares of forest annually -- an area half the size of Switzerland -- up from one million hectares in the 1980s. Forest cover fell from 162 million hectares in 1950 to only 98 million hectares in 2000 and the environmental group Telepak said recently that primary tropical forests have almost vanished from Kalimantan and could disappear from Sumatra island by 2005.
EDIT
A study in August by Indonesia Corruption Watch and non-government group Greenomics Indonesia found that legitimate forestry companies are contributing to illegal logging and other deforestation in Indonesia.
They said poor practices by forestry firms have led to squatting and illegal logging in authorised concessions and sometimes to excessive logging by the firms themselves. The report also pointed to a lack of commitment by authorised loggers to the future of the forests they were working in."
EDIT
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041012/sc_afp/indonesia_environment_041012170220
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