As COP30 begins in Belém, Brazil, we the undersigned express our profound concern over the intensifying deforestation currently occurring in West Papua, Indonesia. 

West Papua has been under Indonesian control since a controversial 1969 process, “the Act of Free Choice”, which saw 1026 West Papuans vote for integration into Indonesia under conditions of intimidation and violence. In 2019, the Act of Free Choice was described by the UK Government as “utterly flawed”. The number of West Papuans killed since Indonesian rule began has been estimated at between 100,000 and 540,000, while a state-backed ‘transmigration’ policy which has relocated more than 800,000 Indonesians to West Papua has likely made the indigenous population a minority.

Indonesian governance in West Papua is characterised by corruption, violation of Indigenous land rights, and widespread deforestation. 71% of the decrease in West Papua’s forest cover has occurred since 2011. Given that the territory contains over half of the world’s third largest rainforest, protecting this unique environment is critical to the preservation of a habitable planet. West Papua is also home to a number of extremely destructive industrial projects. Since 1988, US company Freeport McMoran has operated the world’s largest and most toxic gold mine in the Mimika Regency, which dumps over 200,000 tonnes of toxic tailings into the local Aikwa river system daily. 

More recent deforestation in West Papua has concentrated in agribusiness initiatives as well as mining. In 2024, a government-designated National Strategic Project (PSN) was launched in the southeastern Regency of Merauke, dedicated to sugarcane and rice production. Spanning more than three million hectares in total, the Merauke PSN has been described by conservation news service Mongabay as the largest deforestation project in human history. Upon completion, the PSN will release 782.45 million additional tonnes of CO2, more than doubling Indonesia’s existing yearly CO2 emissions. Much of the Merauke landscape is covered by Melaleuca paperbark trees, which store up to 381 tons of carbon per hectare. This makes the Merauke rainforest a denser CO2 sink than the Amazon rainforest.

As is often the case in West Papua, the Merauke mega-project appears to have been launched without consultation with indigenous West Papuans, deepening an already widespread sense of disenfranchisement and marginalisation. Industrial policy in West Papua is marked by a consistent violation of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC). In another example of this trend, a 2018 investigation into the Tanah Merah mega-plantation in Boven Digoel revealed that all seven of the permits for oil palm concessions had been falsified.

We observe that industrial development is one of the major drivers of violence and internal displacement in West Papua. According to data compiled by human rights defenders on the ground, a total of 102,966 West Papuans were currently displaced as of October 2025. 

This interplay between deforestation and displacement is perhaps clearest in Intan Jaya Regency, where an area of forest the size of Jakarta is currently being cleared for the development of the Wabu Block gold mine. A 2022 Amnesty International report described construction at Wabu Block as having resulted in a ‘clear escalation’ in militarisation, including beatings, restrictions on free movement, extrajudicial killings, and a greatly increased number of military checkpoints. 

Intan Jaya has been a site of intense conflict and multiple human rights abuses in 2025, as construction on the Wabu Block has accelerated. On October 15^th, fifteen civilians were massacred during an Indonesian military raid on Soanggama Village. A similar atrocity was committed in May 2025, when up to fifteen West Papuans were killed or disappeared in Sugapa district. The victims of this massacre included a minor, a 75-year-old, and two women, one of whom was buried by Indonesian soldiers in a shallow grave. In March, a series of aerial military bombardments destroyed a number of villages in Intan Jaya, prompting hundreds of civilians to flee.

We express our deep concern that Indonesia’s programme of deforestation in West Papua, is incompatible with UN’s sustainable development goals, as well as the Tropical Forest Forever Facility set to be launched at COP30. 

We urge leaders at COP to protect the natural environment of the unique rainforest of West Papua. Specifically, we urge leaders to support the Green State Vision developed by the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) for an environmentally just and sustainable West Papua. 

Alex Sobel, MP, UK, Labour Party, IPWP Chair
Carles Puigdemont, MEP, Catalonia (Spanish State), Junts, IPWP Vice-Chair
Gorka Elejabarrieta, Senator, Basque Country (Spanish State), EH Bildu, IPWP Vice-Chair
Matthew Wale MP, Leader of the Opposition, Solomon Islands, IPWP Vice-Chair
Lord Lexden OBE, UK, Conservative
Rt. Reverend Lord Harries of Pentregarth, UK, Crossbench
Maggie Chapman MSP, Scotland (UK), Scottish Greens
Ross Greer MSP, Scotland (UK), Scottish Greens 
Jeremy Corbyn, MP, UK, Your Party
Baroness Nathalie Bennett of Manor Castle, UK, Green Party
Nadia Whittome, MP, UK, Labour Party

Douglas Gerrard

Share on BlueskyShare on FacebookEmailPrint

In the West Papuan regency of Merauke, close to the border with Papua New Guinea, Indonesia is rapidly clearing land in the world’s largest ever deforestation project: three million hectares for sugarcane and rice production. Within three years, Indonesia plans to convert an expanse of forest roughly the size of Belgium into profitable monoculture. The ambition and destructiveness of the development distinguish it from previous mining or agribusiness initiatives in West Papua, which has been under Indonesian occupation since the 1960s. 

At a ground-breaking ceremony in June 2024, Indonesia’s then president, Joko Widodo, described Merauke as Indonesia’s future ‘food barn’. He also touted the potential of converting sugarcane into bioethanol fuel. (On the Raja Ampat islands meanwhile, Papuan activists are fighting plans to exploit nickel reserves for electric vehicle batteries.)

Since formalising its control of West Papua in a fraudulent 1969 referendum, Indonesia has carried out genocidal military assaults – up to a quarter of West Papuans have been killed under occupation – and ‘transmigration’ settlement programmes that have reduced the Indigenous population to a minority. 

In the nine months since he took office, Indonesia’s new president, Prabowo Subianto, has both restarted the transmigration programme and accelarated deforestation in West Papua. Widodo designated Merauke a ‘National Strategic Project’ (PSN), giving the state eminent domain powers to expel civilians. Fifty thousand Indigenous Papuans face displacement over the project’s lifespan; already, people are finding vast tracts of their customary land have been closed to them, with wooden stakes signalling the expropriation by the Indonesian military.

The human costs of the PSN, while severe, are eclipsed by its possible environmental consequences. The destruction of Merauke is set to release over 780 million additional tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere, more than doubling Indonesia’s yearly emissions and leading to irreversible ecosystem collapse in one of the world’s most biodiverse regions. Officials have pressed on with the development while trying to conceal its impact. The energy minister, Bahlil Lahadalia, in charge of parcelling out land to developers, has claimed there is ‘no forest in the middle of Merauke … only eucalyptus, swamps and savannahs’. But though the sago and paperbark mangroves that cover much of the Merauke landscape may appear sparse from above, they store up to 381 tons of carbon per hectare – a higher concentration than the Amazon rainforest. 

The PSN is not Indonesia’s first attempt to convert Merauke into profitable farmland. In the 2010s, huge swathes of the rainforest were razed to make way for a palm oil mega-project, the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE). It has been described by one researcher as effecting an ‘ecologically-induced genocide’ of the Marind tribe, whose gardens and hunting grounds also extend into the territory now threatened by the PSN. As their forest recedes, the Marind are forced to rely on remittances from the corporations that have seized their land. Rice and instant noodles are replacing traditional sago cultivation. 

In her book In the Shadow of the Palms, Sophie Chao describes the warping effects that MIFEE has had on both the environment and the Marind worldview. Before palm oil arrived, the forest provided a rich network of relationships between people, plants and animals. Under the monocrop regime, everything is ‘abu-abu’ – grey, uncertain. In a new documentaryabout Merauke, a Yei tribesman describes the transformation of his land in similarly alienated terms: ‘Before, when I went there [to the forest], I could catch deer, pigs, fish … Now it’s like I’m half dead.’

MIFEE was intended not only to boost Indonesia’s food security, but also to make it a net exporter of rice and palm oil – to ‘feed Indonesia, then the world’. The profit motive is harder to identify in the Merauke PSN. Its advocates have instead emphasised national self-sufficiency, partly in response to the precarity of global supply chains exposed by the Covid pandemic. Even a staunch rightwinger like Prabowo can sound like an anti-colonial nationalist when discussing the project: ‘How can a country be independent if it cannot feed its people?’ he asked in 2023, when he was defence minister. 

During Indonesia’s three decades of dictatorship under Suharto (Prabowo’s father-in-law), more than a third of its national revenue came from West Papua, much of it from the world’s largest gold mine, which was operated until 2017 by the US company Freeport McMoran. But while the Freeport mine primarily enriched foreign and domestic elites, the Merauke PSN is designed to insulate ordinary Indonesians from food and energy shocks – caused by a climate crisis that the PSN will drastically worsen. Both ventures aimed to secure the future of the regime, though in different ways. West Papua has gone from being Indonesia’s gold mine to its larder.

Where private interests are involved in the PSN, the principal beneficiaries are not foreign corporations but politically connected Indonesian entrepreneurs. Co-ordinating the project is the palm oil magnate Andi Syamsuddin Arsyad, also known as Haji Isam (or the ‘new poster boy of Indonesia’s oligarchy’). Isam owns the Jhonlin Group, which has bought two thousand excavators from a Chinese company to begin the deforestation. His cousin, Amran Sulaiman, is the agriculture minister. 

The military role in the development of the PSN goes far beyond their normal land-grabbing and security remit. Following a large recruitment drive in Java, more than three thousand additional troops have been deployed to Merauke, where they are directly engaged in felling and crop cultivation. Instagram posts show fresh-faced soldiers playing at farmers, ineptly watering crops or operating Isam’s excavators. 

Sulaiman has insisted that ‘the military support is there because of a lack of manpower’ – but while most of the soldiers deployed to Merauke may be new recruits, photographs have also surfaced of some sporting the insignia of Yonif Raiders, an elite combat unit notorious among West Papuans for their brutality. In August 2022, a troop of Raiders murdered four Papuan villagers and dumped their dismembered bodies in a local river. Such atrocities are commonplace in the West Papuan highlands, where the armed resistance movement is strongest and international scrutiny all but non-existent. 

Merauke is a lowlands region, which may be one reason the PSN hasn’t yet been met with violence from its opponents. Nonetheless, resistance has been immediate and widespread: there have been mass protests throughout West Papua, while a coalition of NGOs and Indigenous groups has drawn the UN’s attention to the project. A UN fact-finding mission has long been a demand of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), a proto-governmental organisation uniting the three most significant independence factions, operating under the stewardship of the exiled leader Benny Wenda (I have worked with them). 

While the forces arrayed against the ULMWP are forbidding – not least a decades-long ban on foreign media that has kept West Papua from international attention – the climate crisis gives their liberation struggle a global dimension. The New Guinea rainforest is the world’s third largest, after the Amazon and the Congo. Uniquely, tribal struggles for land rights in West Papua form part of a wider revolutionary movement that seeks to replace military-corporate domination with Indigenous sovereignty and a ‘green state’. Wenda has urged environmental activists to ‘accept climate catastrophe or fight for a free West Papua’. Merauke will determine their choice.