Tyre giant Michelin and green group WWF have been criticised by researchers over a rubber plantation in Indonesia that was billed as protecting the environment, but which villagers say has caused deforestation, destroyed elephant habitat and resulted in land grabs.

In 2015, Michelin began work on the 66,000 hectare plantation on the island of Sumatra, partnering with WWF as an adviser, to source rubber from an area that Michelin had said had been ravaged by logging and fires. The French company, one of the world’s biggest buyers of rubber, the plantation would be “deforestation-free”, “protect flora and fauna” by creating a buffer zone for wildlife and generate 16,000 jobs.

But a visit by German researchers to the nearby village of Muara Sekalo in the province of Jambi has unearthed a very different account of the project’s impact.

Farmers from the village, and women working for one of the plantation’s partners, told the team that forests had been cleared to establish the rubber trees. Villagers also reported that the plantation had destroyed the habitat of elephants, leading more of the animals to approach the village and become more aggressive, destroying farmers’ plantations. Several farmers were said to have eventually abandoned their plots as a result.

Some of the villagers reported losing land to the plantation, often because they only held rights through custom, not official deeds recognised by government ministries. One village elder said of land with trees his ancestors had grown: “I feel like it is not fair to give the land to the company, but then we don’t have any proof of the ownership but the trees.”

“The main point is really the mismatch between the framing of sustainable development on the one side and what’s happening on the ground on the other,” says Fenna Otten at the University of Gottingen, Germany, who visited the village at the end of 2017.

She says the project wasn’t entirely negative. Villagers reported that the plantation had created jobs, and one person was excited by the prospect of being trained in rubber tapping. Some of the women working for the plantation were pleased to be paid cash in hand. Others said the economic impact was mixed. One villager said: “The village economy did not change significantly, sometimes the situation is better, sometimes it is worse.”

In a statement, Michelin said the project was “very important to Michelin and to all its stakeholders” and it regretted the researchers hadn’t contacted the company.

WWF said it was an adviser on the project, but not involved in running it. “Although we regret the authors of the report haven’t contacted us to verify the study, we shall discuss the findings with all those involved and call for them to urgently address any concerns raised by the local communities,” a spokesperson says.

First to Flores

It’s a health disaster in terms of dangerous air pollution. It’s an ecological disaster in terms of the loss of habitat for threatened species like the orangutan. And it’s a global disaster in terms of releasing massive quantities of carbon dioxide.

Tens of thousands of fires have raged in Indonesia this year, largely on Sumatra, in Papua and in the Kalimantan region of Borneo.

The fires have emitted 1.6 gigatonnes of CO₂ so far, says Guido van der Werf of the VU University in the Netherlands, who works on the . To put that in perspective, it has been estimated that the entire world must emit less than 1000 Gt of CO₂ from 2011 onwards if we are to avoid dangerous warming.

CO₂ from wildfires is normally taken back up again as plants regrow. But this won’t be the case in Indonesia, because the fires are also burning peat that has accumulated over thousands of years, releasing buried carbon. “You can assume that almost all CO₂ emissions [from the fires] will stay in the atmosphere,” says van der Werf.

Forest fires blaze every year in Indonesia, but they burn most fiercely in El Niño years, when the region is drier. The good news is that this year’s El Niño looks like it won’t be anywhere near as bad as in 1997, when fires in Indonesia emitted over 4 Gt of CO₂.

Rain arrived on the island of Borneo last week, and the number of new fires detected has dropped substantially, so the worst may now be over.

Arrests

Burning issue

It’s a world record nobody wants. Not only is Indonesia deforesting faster than any other country, the coming El Niño looks set to take the country’s forest loss to record levels.

Satellite data shows Indonesia lost 60,000 square kilometres of primary forest between 2000 and 2012 (). The forests are cleared, usually by burning, to make way for oil palm plantations.

With deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon having slowed, Indonesia is the new global centre of tropical forest loss, says of the University of Maryland at College Park, who analysed the data.

The deforestation has continued despite the Indonesian government declaring a moratorium on further forest clearance in 2011. According to Margono, the fastest ever recorded deforestation in the country happened in the first year after the moratorium.

The El Niño now emerging in the Pacific will only make things worse. During an El Niño, warm water spreads over the eastern Pacific, affecting global weather. This week the UK’s Met Office predicted a “” El Niño. But even a weak one can bring drought to Indonesia, making burning easier.

Burn them trees

It is already extensive, says the World Resources Institute (WRI), a think tank in Washington DC. In late June, . Thick clouds of hazardous smoke are heading for densely populated Malaysia and Singapore.

So far the fires have been concentrated in Riau province on Sumatra, which has been intensely cleared in recent years. More than 150 fires were recorded there during the week ending 23 June, says of WRI.

According to WRI, about 75 of the fires were in concessions owned by , part of the giant conglomerate. The company has previously denied responsibility for fires on its land, saying they were set by outsiders, such as local smallholders.

The fires will warm the climate. During the major El Niño of 1997-98, Indonesian forest fires released around 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, equal to a quarter of all fossil fuel emissions at the time ().

The climate threat from such fires is increasing, because the biggest increase in Indonesian forest loss has taken place in swamp forests, says Margono. When peat in these swamps burns, it produces more smoke and carbon emissions than do ordinary forest fires. The fires “are probably not caused by smallholders, but by agro-industrial land developers”, she says.