Subscribe
Voxeurop Camdelafu femicide

Christelle Taraud: The feminicide continuum, ‘a war machine directed against women’
Illegal forest clearance in the Gran Chaco as seen from the air in Argentina. Image by Jim Wickens, Ecostorm via Mighty Earth.

Europe’s stubborn addiction to deforested Argentinian soy
WHO WE ARE
EDITORIAL POLICY
BECOMING A SHAREHOLDER

European green finance and Indonesian deforestation: Glossary and methodology

Glossary

Asia Debt Management (ADM Capital): Investment firm based in Hong Kong. Co-founder of TLFF with BNP Paribas.

Barito Pacific: Indonesian agroforestry and energy group founded in 1979 by tycoon Prajogo Pangestu. Barito Pacific entered into a joint venture with Michelin in 2014.

BNP Paribas: Europe's largest bank by assets and the world's 8th largest. It is responsible for marketing green bonds issued by TLFF, which it co-founded with ADM Capital.

Bukit Tigapuluh National Park: A nature reserve in the eastern part of Sumatra Island, Indonesia. It is famous for being home to some of the last remaining examples of endangered species, such as the orangutan, the Sumatran tiger and the Sumatran elephant.

Climate Bonds Initiative (CBI), the largest certification platform for the financing of sustainable projects.

High Carbon Stocks (HCS): Forest areas with high carbon storage, including dense tropical forests

High Conservation Value (HCV): Areas of high conservation value. These are ecosystems whose biological, social, ecological or cultural value is particularly significant at the regional, national or international level.

Indonesian Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA): Among other things, it is responsible for protecting endangered species.

International Capital Market Association (ICMA): Trade association. It certifies that a project complies with the Association's principles for green bonds.

International Financial Corporation (IFC): the private investment arm of the World Bank.

International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN): An NGO that promotes sustainable development. Has 1,400 member organisations in 160 countries.

Lestari Asri Jaya (LAJ): A subsidiary of Royal Lestari Utama that manages the rubber tree plantation and operation in Jambi, Sumatra.

MapHubs: Indonesia-based technology company specialising in software tools and services for monitoring deforestation and natural resources.

Michelin: World's largest tyre manufacturer. Initiated the joint venture with Barito Pacific to cultivate rubber trees in Jambi, Sumatra.

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP): Provided environmental oversight during the creation of the Tropical Landscape Finance Facility (TLFF) by BNP Paribas and ADM Capital.

Royal Lestari Utama (RLU): Indonesian natural rubber producer. Created in 2015 from the joint venture between Michelin and Barito Pacific. Wholly owned by Michelin since June 2022.

TFT/Earthworm: TFT was a non-profit environmental consultancy based in the UK. Transformed into a Swiss-based foundation called Earthworm.

Tropical Landscape Finance Facility (TLFF): The sustainable finance platform jointly created by BNP Paribas, ADM Capital and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). It issued the green bonds that funded the RLU project in Jambi.

United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Provided a partial guarantee on the TLFF loan to Royal Lestari Utama for the rubber plantation.

Vigeo Eiris: French social and environmental ratings agency. Acquired by Moody's in 2019.World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The most well-known NGO for the defence of nature and biodiversity. Michelin asked the WWF to check that the Royal Lestari Utama project was environmentally sound.

Methodology

To produce this investigation, journalists from Voxeurop and Tempo in Jakarta went through hundreds of pages of documents, tables, maps, infographics and reports, some of which were given to them in confidence. They spoke to all the stakeholders both on the ground and by phone and email, sometimes several times, to check and confirm every detail as thoroughly as possible. Some testimonies were given anonymously in order to protect their source.

To calculate industrial and non-industrial forest clearance in the rubber and wildlife conservation areas of the Royal Lestari Utama concession, various data sources and geographic information system (GIS) tools were used. These included MapHubs (for map creation), Global Forest Watch (for deforestation and fire analysis) and QGIS (for spatial analysis). These were used to digitise the land-use maps published by the RLU project and to analyse deforestation based on medium- and high-resolution satellite images. Printed and interactive maps were produced using MapHubs Pro and additional GIS and land classification analyses were carried out using QGIS.

To analyse the forest cover data, four forest-cover layers were developed using NASA Landsat 5, 7 and 8 and commercial Airbus SPOT 6 satellite imagery, which used high-resolution satellite images ranging from 50 cm to 1.5 m in resolution. These layers were used to identify locations and hectares of forest loss. The following dates from the satellite images were selected as they correspond to key moments in the history of Barito Pacific.Using high-resolution satellite images ranging from 50 cm to 1.5 m, MapHubs was able to distinguish between industrial deforestation and deforestation by smallholders or encroachment. Industrial deforestation is identified by its distinctive pattern of coordinated road building and terracing, which is characteristic of the industrial land-preparation techniques used in palm-oil concessions; non-industrial deforestation is identified by a mosaic of burnt, cultivated and semi-cultivated areas accessed by existing roads and tracks.