Wary of interference in the government’s ambitious development goals, Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry and Environmental Affairs has tightened control over research on the country’s enormous biological diversity by both Indonesian and foreign scientists.
Scientists and nongovernmental organizations say producing reliable population estimates and mapping remaining habitats are crucial to conservation. The environment ministry’s provincial conservation agencies and national park rangers have supported such work on the ground, for example by counting orangutan nests, collecting elephant dung samples, and setting camera traps for tigers. But researchers say KLHK’s headquarters has kept data from such efforts under wraps.
Wulan Pusparini, an Indonesian wildlife conservationist at the University of Oxford, says her DNA-based population survey has shown the elephant population in a national park in southern Sumatra declined by 75% between 2001 and 2015. Provincial BKSDA officials were “very supportive” when she presented those data in 2018, she says, “but it got stuck in Jakarta.” KLHK’s central office has not allowed her to publish the findings, Pusparini says.
In 2020, the Sumatran Elephant Conservation Forum, a consortium of scientists and conservationists from various NGOs and BKSDA offices, produced what it called an Urgent Action Plan describing remaining elephant populations, the threats they face, and how they could be protected. KLHK’s director of conservation signed and released the document, but the ministry retracted it a year later. Among the reasons was what KLHK called “a counterproductive statement against the government” in the plan.
Studies on other species have met a similar fate. KLHK has not approved a consortium’s estimate for Indonesia’s tiger population, submitted in 2016; the data remain unpublished. The ministry also at the International Union for Conservation of Nature that estimates there are fewer than 50 Sumatran rhinos left in the wild. KLHK says it’s between 67 and 75.
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