Satellite mapping puts 750,000 hectares of Indonesian forest inside biomass concessions

Indonesia supplied about 4.7 percent of Japan's wood pellet imports in 2025 ^[18]. Work backwards from the reported 35 percent rise and Japan's 2024 total lands near 6.4 million tons, meaning the country added roughly 2.24 million tons of pellet imports in a single year ^[19]. Indonesia's entire gain between 2023 and 2025, about 336,000 tons, is around 15 percent of that one-year increase ^[20]. The Indonesian trade grew about sixfold, off a very small base ^[21].

The 750,000 hectares in the analysis is permitted area that overlaps natural forest ^[4]. It measures what the permits cover, not what has been cut. Manurung said only a few biomass mills are operating in Indonesia now, against a growing trend of concession permits across the country ^[5]. So the strongest number here measures what has been licensed for clearing, and few of the mills that would do that clearing exist yet.

"The biomass industry has become a new driver of deforestation in Indonesia," said Timer Manurung, director of Auriga Nusantara, which contributed to the analysis ^[2]. "And most of the biomass product is for export, with Japan as the biggest destination," he said ^[3].

Manurung said Indigenous communities living inside the concession areas will be affected, including the isolated Polahi ^[22]. "It will totally erase all the natural cover which provide a living and is an integral part of the culture to the Polahi people," he said ^[13]. The organizations also found that biomass-linked clearing could reach undisturbed forest that is habitat for tarsiers and for endemic buffalo and pigs ^[14].

Worldwide bioenergy use rose by more than 55 percent between 2015 and 2024, according to the International Energy Agency ^[8]. In Japan, biomass was under 6 percent of electricity generation in 2024, according to the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies ^[9]. The IEA's stated position is that the demand should be met from waste and crop residue instead of converting forest land to grow bioenergy crops ^[10].

The argument also runs to the chemistry of burning wood. phys.org reports that many scientists and environmentalists reject wood-based biomass outright, saying that burning it can emit more carbon than coal and that felling trees cuts a forest's capacity to remove carbon from the air ^[11]. Coal plants can be modified without much difficulty to burn wood alongside coal, and critics say co-firing prolongs the fossil plant's life ^[12].

Japan has provided millions of dollars of support for biomass development in Indonesia through research, policy and construction, according to a review of publicly available business records described in the phys.org report ^[16]. Critics quoted in the same account say continued subsidies and weak supply-chain oversight will allow more razing of pristine forest ^[17]. Indonesia's ministries of Environment and Forestry and of Energy and Mineral Resources did not respond to requests for comment ^[15].