According to Finer, ACCA's Sidney Novoa and the Instituto de Pesquisas Ecologicas's Clinton Jenkins, Santa Catalina and Tierra Blanca together would involve clearing 13,900 hectares of primary forest.
Operations on two plantations called Maniti and Santa Cecilia which would involve clearing more than 9,300 hectares of primary forest could start imminently following a recent government decision.
Key to the plan is a two-year moratorium on the issuance of new permits to clear more than 150 million acres of primary forest and carbon-intensive peatlands scattered across the several time zones spanning the thousands of equatorial islands of the vast Indonesian archipelago.
As forest is cleared, previously remote, and therefore safer, tracts of primary forest become accessible and, eventually, degraded.
Lawson says the Peruvian peatland of Pastaza-Marañón is "threatened by the expansion of commercial agriculture linked to new transport infrastructure". Cultivators have already moved into the neighboring region of Ucayali, where 22,000 acres of primary forest were recently cleared for an oil palm plantation.
Any plots that were reported as being newly acquired through clearing of forest were assumed to represent loss of primary forest.
Because previous estimates of forest loss have included the clearing of pulp plantations and oil palm estates the real loss of primary forest has until now been obscured.
Gaps in research exist for tropical forest areas that are now a general mix of primary forest and secondary vegetation interspersed with patches cleared for agriculture or other non-forest uses (Bruijnzeel, 2004, Giambelluca, 2002).
But the figures are potentially embarrassing because they suggest that a 2011 moratorium on granting new licenses for clearing or logging of primary forests and carbon-rich peatlands could have been a driver for deforestation.
For example, companies are clearing massive areas of primary forests in the Peruvian Amazon for new plantations.
