A science-based pathway shows how food, energy and climate goals can advance without further deforestation.
JAKARTA — As Indonesia seeks to meet rising demand for food and energy while honouring its climate commitments and forest protection goals, policymakers face a growing dilemma. Conventional development pathways often rely on expanding agricultural or energy production into forested areas, risking biodiversity loss, carbon emissions and long-term ecological resilience.
A recent perspective published in the Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science argues that Indonesia does not need to choose between economic growth and forest conservation. Instead, the authors point to a largely untapped solution: transforming degraded, marginal and underutilised lands into the foundation of a forest-positive bioeconomy.
RELEVANT SUSTAINABLE GOALS
A National Trilemma Comes Into Focus
Indonesia’s challenge is increasingly clear. Population growth and economic expansion are driving higher demand for food and energy, even as the country has committed to ambitious climate targets and the protection of its remaining natural forests.
Traditional approaches to meeting these demands often depend on land expansion, placing additional pressure on forest landscapes. Such strategies may deliver short-term gains but risk undermining biodiversity, eroding carbon stocks and locking in development models that are difficult to sustain.
A Science-Based Alternative
The perspective, authored by Baral and colleagues — including Robert Nasi, director of science at Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) — outlines a different pathway.
Rather than converting forests, the authors argue for restoration-oriented, climate-smart agroforestry and bioenergy systems located on degraded lands. These landscapes, already characterised by low productivity and diminished ecological function, are increasingly seen not as liabilities, but as opportunities for transformation.
On degraded and marginal lands, the article describes how integrated systems can combine multiple functions. Food crops can support nutrition and local markets, while bioenergy trees provide renewable energy and biomass. Livestock can be incorporated into agroforestry mosaics, creating diversified production systems.
Together, these combinations can increase overall land productivity, strengthen rural livelihoods and enhance net carbon sequestration — all without further forest loss.
Why Degraded Lands Matter
Indonesia has vast areas of degraded, marginal and underutilised land, including millions of hectares of former agricultural plots, low-productivity forests and soil-impoverished tracts. In their current condition, many of these areas contribute little to food security, biodiversity or climate mitigation.
Redirecting development efforts toward such lands offers a way to decouple economic growth from deforestation. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for a forest-positive bioeconomy — one in which natural forests are conserved and ecological restoration becomes a central development strategy.
Restoration-oriented bioeconomy systems can deliver multiple benefits at once. They have the potential to diversify rural incomes, expand renewable energy supply and contribute to carbon storage. They also align with Indonesia’s national development plans and commitments under the Paris Agreement.
The authors are clear, however, that scaling these approaches will not be simple. Key challenges include clarifying land tenure and governance, investing in processing and market infrastructure, designing participatory models that include smallholders, and establishing long-term financing mechanisms that reward restoration outcomes.
These barriers are significant, but the authors argue they are manageable when addressed through coherent landscape-level planning and integrated value-chain strategies.
Policy Implications and Next Steps
For policymakers and practitioners, the central message is straightforward: protecting forests and advancing economic development are not competing objectives, but interdependent ones.
By prioritising degraded lands for multi-purpose use, Indonesia can pursue a bioeconomy that is productive, equitable and genuinely forest-positive. Doing so will require cross-sector collaboration among forestry, agriculture, energy and rural development agencies, as well as targeted research and pilot projects that test climate-smart agroforestry and bioenergy systems under real-world conditions.
As global interest in nature-based solutions continues to grow, the authors suggest that Indonesia’s approach to degraded land management could offer valuable lessons for other tropical countries seeking sustainable development without sacrificing their forest heritage.
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