Jakarta4.6 Mha of key biodiversity areas face clearing.
The study identifies rights-holders across 3,754 concessions in Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia and Myanmar, making voluntary conservation cheaper than new reserves.
Carbon markets alone cannot unlock all 42 Mha; the study calls for complementary finance and governance reform.
Sources: Nature
WHAT A CONCESSION ACTUALLY IS
A logging concession is a long-term lease — typically 25 to 70 years — granting a company the right to extract timber from state-owned forest. The land remains government property; the trees, until cut, do not. This legal split is what makes concession-based conservation possible: pay the concessionaire to leave trees standing, and the state's ownership is undisturbed.
THE SELECTIVE-LOGGING MYTH
Tropical concessions are usually 'selectively logged' — only commercial species above a diameter threshold are cut. The forest looks intact from a satellite. But skid trails, log landings, and canopy gaps damage 30-50% of remaining trees, and the road network opens the interior to hunters and squatters who do the second wave of clearing.
WHY VOLUNTARY IS CHEAPER THAN PROTECTED
Creating a new national park requires expropriation, compensation, boundary surveys, ranger hiring, and decades of legal challenge. Buying out a concessionaire — or paying them per hectare to defer cutting — uses the existing tenure map. The transaction is contractual, not constitutional.
WHY CARBON MARKETS DON'T COVER IT
REDD+ credits price one tonne of avoided CO2 at $5-15. A hectare of intact peat forest stores 200-600 tonnes above ground and several thousand below — but voluntary buyers pay only for what would have been cut imminently, the 'additional' slice. Biodiversity, watershed regulation, and indigenous tenure have no liquid market. The funding gap is structural, not promotional.
THE PEATLAND MULTIPLIER
Indonesia and Malaysia hold over half the world's tropical peatlands. Drained peat oxidizes and burns; the 2015 Indonesian fires released more CO2 per day than the entire US economy at peak. Conservation inside Southeast Asian concessions is disproportionate climate leverage — same hectare, ten times the carbon at risk.
THE ENFORCEMENT QUESTION
A concession contract is only as strong as the ministry that signs it. Indonesia's forestry ministry has revoked, reissued, and re-revoked the same plots through three administrations. Voluntary conservation depends on a state willing to honor a deal that costs it short-term royalty revenue.