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Deforestation & Certification What do we know about desert in middle east now is certainly different if we live 9,000 years ago. At that time, the forest was still thick, there were thousands of lakes, fertile farm, and ancient elephant and hippopotamus that can’t live in dry environment. It’s all the past, now it has changed to desert. Initially, it is because of human production activities which use nature for agriculture production and subsistence activity. Hereafter, the forest exploitation politics of ancient middle east civilization used it for infrastructure construction. Furthermore, climate crises which also has a role on changing wet climate into dry. We learn from this story about how human, politics, and climate have roles in the change of landscape, one of them is forest damage. Then, how is the current forest destruction? Based on the data from Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in the last 30 years, our earth lost very vast of forest; 178 million ha or equivalent to the land area of Indonesia if it is subtracted by Sumbawa island area. There are various causes. In 1990-2000, the main cause of deforestation is because a massive forest exploitation and reckless, regardless of regeneration ability of the trees and forest. In global scale in 2000 until now, 40 % of deforestation cause is the large scale of plantation and agriculture. The other cause is subsistence agriculture, the population growth, urban expansion, infrastructure, and mining. Currently, our earth is still covered by 30 % of forest or about 4.06 million ha where 0.5 ha of the forest bears 1 person’s live. So, how about Indonesia? If we calculate with the same way since 30 years ago, the highest deforestation occurred in period 1996 – 2000, that is 3.5 million ha/year. Then, in period 2002 – 2014, decreased between 600,000 until 400,000 ha. Finally, the lowest point of deforestation rate was in 2020 in the amount of 115,000 ha. Before we calculate the forest destruction in 1990, we will ask you to be back off a little to look how the story of forest exploitation history from after World War II until 1980’s. FAO report which was published in 1966 showed that timber consumption rate from tropical forest increased significantly in two stages, that is 1950–1965; then 3
