Riau is the ecological heart of Sumatra. Its remaining natural forests and peatland landscapes store vast carbon stocks, regulate water systems, and provide living space for millions of people. Yet over the past two decades, this heart has faced increasingly serious pressures.
In 2024, deforestation in Riau was recorded at around 29,702 hectares, the highest in Sumatra. In 2025, 4,449 fire hotspots were recorded, most of them on peatlands. At the same time, the poverty rate in March 2025 stood at around 6.16%, with significant concentrations in villages surrounding forest areas. These pressures do not exist in isolation.
Riau also faces structural challenges in the form of unequal land control, the dominance of large-scale concessions, and fragmented governance across sectors. In many areas, forest landscapes are divided by permits that are not always integrated with long-term ecological planning. As a result, hydrological functions are disrupted, land conflicts recur, and forest village communities are often placed in a vulnerable position between the responsibility to protect forests and the need to support their families.
This situation shows that Riau’s forestry crisis is not merely a technical issue, but a systemic problem that requires strong and integrated policy intervention. The forestry crisis in Riau is not only an environmental issue, but also an issue of equitable access and welfare.
It is in this context that the proposed Regional Regulation on Social Forestry, currently on the agenda of the Riau Provincial Legislative Council, becomes crucial, as it aims to provide a strong legal foundation to support the implementation of social forestry in accordance with local socio-cultural and ecological conditions. This regulation is also expected to become an operational foundation for the low-emission development agenda known as Green for Riau.
Structural Problems in Riau’s Forestry Sector
1. Deforestation and Peatland Vulnerability
Structural problems in the forestry sector are often rooted in the imbalance between economic ambition and environmental carrying capacity. In regions such as Riau, the landscape is dominated by peatland ecosystems that are highly sensitive to changes in management.
As massive natural carbon stores, peatlands require high levels of moisture to remain stable. However, when large-scale land conversion takes place without considering hydrological aspects, these landscapes lose their integrity and become vulnerable in ways that are difficult to reverse quickly.
Deforestation is a major trigger of damage to water regulation functions, with wide-ranging impacts on ecological stability. When forest cover disappears, the hydrological cycle is disrupted, directly reducing the soil’s ability to absorb and channel water naturally.
This condition creates an extreme environmental paradox: communities face the risk of major flooding during the rainy season because water is no longer retained, while severe drought occurs during the dry season. As a result, ecological productivity declines sharply and threatens the sustainability of surrounding living spaces.
Furthermore, peatland drainage through the construction of canals causes this organic material to become highly flammable. Increased carbon emissions released when peat burns or degrades make a significant contribution to global warming.
Forest and land fires are not merely environmental issues, but humanitarian crises that paralyze many aspects of life. The resulting haze harms public health, disrupts educational activities, and damages local economies by restricting mobility and the distribution of goods.
Without a transformation in forest and land management models, this disaster cycle will continue to repeat itself. A paradigm shift is needed from exploitation toward restoration and protection based on landscape-based management.
Strengthening regulation and law enforcement related to water management on peatlands is essential. If these structural pressures are not immediately addressed through sustainable policies, the ecological and social losses will far outweigh the short-term economic gains.
2. Unequal Access and Tenurial Conflict
Unequal land control is a root problem that creates a wide gap between large corporations and local communities. Structurally, much of the forest area has been allocated through large-scale concession permits, while management spaces for Indigenous Peoples or local communities often lack legal recognition.
This imbalance creates a situation in which communities that have lived around forests for generations may be regarded as encroachers on their own ancestral lands, triggering social tensions that are difficult to resolve.
This condition gives rise to tenurial conflicts that remain latent and recur in many areas. Conflicting interests between concession holders and local residents often lead to intimidation, criminalization, and even physical violence.
Without legal certainty over community management areas, boundaries become unclear and vulnerable to unilateral claims. These conflicts not only discourage investment, but also damage social structures and local wisdom that should serve as a protective barrier for forest sustainability.
The absence of legal access places communities in an economic dilemma. Without long-term certainty, communities tend to pursue short-term extractive activities simply to survive.
Without assurance that they can manage the land across generations, incentives to preserve ecosystems disappear. Activities such as illegal land clearing or tree cutting become rational but destructive choices in the absence of a legally protected sense of ownership.
To break this cycle of conflict, agrarian reform and the strengthening of social forestry programmes can no longer be postponed. Policy transformation must be directed toward a more equitable redistribution of access, in which communities are granted legal rights to manage forests sustainably.
With clear recognition of tenurial rights, communities can plan more stable livelihoods that are aligned with conservation principles. Only through such reconciliation of rights can security and environmental sustainability in forest areas truly be achieved.
3. Poverty in Villages Around Forests
Poverty in villages surrounding forests is a striking irony. Local communities often live in deprivation while residing on land that is extremely rich in natural resources.
Structurally, spatial injustice occurs where vast forest areas are divided among large-scale permits, while villagers become spectators or laborers on their own ancestral lands.
This inequality of access creates a deep economic divide, where abundant natural wealth does not translate into improved welfare for communities living closest to those resources.
The absence of fair management rights forces communities into uncertain informal economic activities. Without adequate capital support and market access, communities tend to exploit forests at a subsistence level merely to meet daily basic needs.
Forests that should serve as assets for sustainable development ultimately become fragile short-term sources of livelihood because communities lack the legal and financial instruments needed to manage these resources professionally and competitively.
To break this cycle of injustice, community enterprise paradigms must shift from dependence on timber toward the management of more environmentally friendly and sustainable Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs).
Potential products such as forest honey, agarwood, damar resin, jelutung, essential oils, medicinal plants, and environmental services such as ecotourism represent a “treasure trove” that has long been overlooked.
By optimizing NTFPs, communities can generate economic added value without cutting trees, allowing forests to remain intact while households continue to earn a living. This is a middle path for restoring forests as a source of prosperity for people, rather than merely commodities for industry.
The economic transformation of forest villages requires real policy intervention to create spatial justice through recognition of community management rights. The government must ensure that village communities are no longer objects of development, but become the main actors in NTFP value chains through technical assistance and simplified market access.
Only by providing spatial certainty and shifting toward non-timber economies can the irony of poverty amid abundant natural resources be ended. In this way, sustainable forests can truly become the foundation of dignified economic independence for rural communities.
Social Forestry as a Transformational Solution
Social Forestry (SF) represents an approach based on equitable access that seeks to reform unequal structures of land control.
By granting management legality to local communities, SF is not simply about distributing land, but is a strategic instrument for reducing long-standing tenurial conflicts. Legal recognition provides security for villagers and automatically strengthens their incentives to protect and care for forests.
When communities feel that their rights are protected by the state, forests are no longer viewed as objects for short-term exploitation, but as future assets whose sustainability must be maintained.
The potential for economic transformation through SF is substantial, particularly in promoting the use of NTFPs and environmental services. This approach allows communities to develop productive enterprises without damaging standing forests, such as forest cultivation, community-based ecotourism, and other activities.
In addition, SF serves as a bridge for more effective restoration and rehabilitation efforts by involving communities as the main actors on the ground. Active community participation in maintaining peatland hydrology and forest cover is key to more organic and long-lasting ecosystem recovery.
However, realities on the ground often reveal a wide gap between regulatory mandates and economic realities. Many community groups that have already obtained Social Forestry Decrees remain trapped in administrative stagnation.
The granting of permits is often treated as an end point, when in fact it is only an entry point. Without intensive and sustained business assistance, these groups struggle to manage their institutions.
As a result, the legal documents they hold do not automatically translate into real improvements in welfare because of limited managerial capacity at the site level.
The obstacles become even more apparent when communities face difficulties accessing financing and lack market networks or offtakers. Without capital support for production equipment and connections to fair buyers, community NTFP products often struggle to compete or are purchased at low prices by speculators.
Furthermore, SF programmes often operate independently without integrated support for landscape restoration, meaning environmental recovery functions do not operate optimally.
Synergy between ecosystem restoration programmes and community economic strengthening is often poorly aligned in terms of budgeting and implementation at the site level. As a result, communities are burdened with the responsibility of protecting forests without being given sufficient “tools” and policy protection to do so.
If these barriers are not immediately addressed through concrete and integrated assistance, Social Forestry risks becoming merely an administrative label or “a number on paper” that fails to address fundamental problems.
Without full government support to connect communities with banking, technology, and markets, the aspiration for economic justice will remain difficult to achieve.
Ultimately, failure in providing assistance will not only harm community welfare, but also threaten the sustainability of Indonesia’s forests as communities lose confidence in the management model that has been promised.
Why Is a Social Forestry Regional Regulation Key?
According to the official website of the Riau Provincial Legislative Council, the proposed regulation is formulated with the aim of improving community welfare through legal access and protection in forest management, promoting environmental conservation through community-based forest management, resolving agrarian conflicts inclusively and fairly, and recognizing and protecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities as an integral part of sustainable forest management.
Its objectives include strengthening community access rights through village forests, community forests, customary forests, and other schemes; improving local economies through sustainable utilization of non-timber forest products; conserving ecosystems to reduce deforestation and forest degradation; resolving land conflicts through legal and administrative mechanisms; and strengthening community management capacity through training, facilitation, and access to financing.
To translate these strategic objectives into concrete implementation, the Social Forestry Regional Regulation becomes essential for five fundamental reasons:
1. Securing Regional Budget Commitments
The existence of a Social Forestry Regional Regulation is crucial for ensuring stable and sustainable funding for the empowerment of communities living around forests.
Without a legal framework at the level of a Regional Regulation, financial support often remains merely a temporary discretionary policy that is vulnerable to changes in regional leadership.
With a Regional Regulation in place, regional budget allocations for facilitation programmes, production equipment, and capacity building for SF groups become constitutional obligations that must be fulfilled every fiscal year.
Budget certainty is the “lifeblood” of economic sustainability at the site level. Communities cannot simply be left on their own after receiving management decrees without state investment in infrastructure for processing forest products.
With measurable financial support through the Regional Regulation, regional governments can build supporting infrastructure, provide competitive grants, and fund professional facilitators who support communities until they achieve economic independence.
2. Integrating Cross-Agency Work
Until now, Social Forestry implementation has often been affected by sectoral silos, where the Forestry Agency is considered the sole responsible institution. In reality, the challenges facing forest village communities are complex and require the involvement of multiple agencies.
The Social Forestry Regional Regulation serves as a bridge to synchronize the roles of, for example, the Cooperatives and MSME Agency for marketing, the Agriculture or Fisheries Agency for technical cultivation support, and Bappeda for synchronization with regional development planning, so that empowerment programmes are no longer fragmented.
This integration creates a comprehensive support ecosystem from upstream to downstream.
Through the Regional Regulation, coordination among regional government agencies becomes a formal mandate requiring each institution to develop mutually supportive work programmes.
For example, when communities produce non-timber products such as honey or rattan, the Forestry Agency ensures the sustainability of raw materials in the forest, while the Industry and Trade Agency facilitates product certification and access to modern retail markets.
3. Establishing Specific Ecological Targets
The Social Forestry Regional Regulation provides space for regions to formulate ecological success indicators that reflect their unique characteristics, such as peatland ecosystem protection in Riau.
This regulation allows regional governments to include concrete targets such as reducing the number of fire hotspots, restoring degraded forest areas, and protecting biodiversity within regional planning documents.
These targets become performance standards that bind both government and communities in maintaining forest ecological functions.
When such targets are embedded in regional law, conservation is no longer merely an appeal, but becomes a shared responsibility.
Communities granted management rights are incentivized to restore and rehabilitate degraded land because the sustainability of their enterprises depends on healthy forests.
This regulation ensures that the use of forests for welfare remains aligned with climate change mitigation efforts and the preservation of soil and water systems in forest areas.
4. Supporting the Resolution of Agrarian Conflicts
One of the major problems in forest areas is land disputes between local communities and holders of large-scale concession permits.
The Social Forestry Regional Regulation provides a more systematic and inclusive regional legal basis for facilitating mediation and resolving such conflicts.
With formally regulated mechanisms at the regional level, conflict resolution is no longer carried out unilaterally or repressively, but through administrative and dialogue-based approaches that recognize existing community rights.
This regional legal framework gives legitimacy to district, municipal, and provincial governments to conduct fairer verification and validation of land claims in the field.
Conflict resolution facilitated through the Regional Regulation ensures legal certainty for all parties, maintaining the investment climate while recognizing community management rights.
This is important for creating regional security stability and eliminating the criminalization of village communities that often occurs because of unclear territorial boundaries.
5. Promoting Recognition of Customary Forests
The Social Forestry Regional Regulation serves as a strategic entry point for promoting the recognition and protection of Customary Forests, which have often been hindered by complex bureaucracy.
Through this regulation, regional governments gain an instrument to identify, map, and validate the existence of Indigenous Law Communities (MHA) and their customary territories.
This recognition is crucial for restoring Indigenous Peoples’ sovereignty over management areas that they have protected for generations through local wisdom.
The presence of the Social Forestry Regional Regulation creates administrative momentum for regions to inventory Indigenous communities that have not yet been formally recorded.
As a catalyst, the regulation can accelerate the development of more definitive Customary Forest regulations, ensuring comprehensive legal protection for communities’ traditional rights over their management areas.
In this way, the Social Forestry Regional Regulation acts as an entry point for strengthening Indigenous sovereignty, ensuring that local wisdom remains a key pillar in protecting forests in the future.
By integrating Customary Forest protection into regional regulations, Indigenous Peoples’ rights are no longer merely symbolic recognition, but receive strong legal protection against land dispossession.
The existence of Customary Forests recognized through regional regulations will strengthen one of the last lines of defense for Indonesia’s forests, as Indigenous Peoples have proven management systems capable of balancing economic needs with environmental sustainability.
This step also reinforces that local communities are the main actors, not spectators, in equitable forest governance.
Social Forestry Regulation as a Pillar of Green for Riau
The success of the Green for Riau policy agenda depends greatly on effective land governance and the protection of forest ecosystems as major carbon sinks.
This is where the Social Forestry Regional Regulation plays a crucial role as an instrument that turns environmental narratives into real action, preventing them from becoming merely technocratic agendas on paper that are disconnected from the realities of forest village communities.
The Social Forestry Regional Regulation contributes directly to climate change mitigation by significantly reducing deforestation rates and forest fire risks.
Through secure community management access, local monitoring at the site level becomes the frontline in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The transition toward a Green Economy also becomes more realistic because Social Forestry opens the way for the development of environmentally friendly commodities.
With regulatory support, products such as forest honey, agroforestry coffee, and ecotourism services are no longer merely side businesses, but can become new economic engines that generate income without damaging standing forests.
Furthermore, the regulation opens opportunities for communities to access performance-based financing schemes, such as payments for environmental services or carbon incentives.
Strengthened governance through the Regional Regulation gives confidence to donors and international carbon markets that forest protection in Riau is carried out transparently and accountably by local communities.
This creates a positive cycle in which forest conservation generates financial incentives that are reinvested in community welfare and independent land rehabilitation.
Ultimately, the Social Forestry Regional Regulation is key to realizing Climate Justice within the Green for Riau framework.
Green for Riau should not only focus on figures related to temperature reduction or tonnes of carbon, but must also ensure the fair distribution of economic benefits to those living on the frontlines of environmental conservation.
By making the Social Forestry Regional Regulation a central pillar, we ensure that the transformation toward a low-carbon future proceeds alongside poverty reduction and recognition of local community rights.
This is the true essence of sustainable development: forests remain protected, and the people of Riau live independently.
Looking Ahead: Restored Environment, Prosperous Communities
Protecting the heart of Riau is a collective responsibility to ensure that the breath of life is preserved for future generations.
The Social Forestry Regional Regulation must become a binding, integrated legal instrument that fully supports a just long-term transformation.
If designed with a clear vision and implemented with strong commitment, this regulation will become a major pillar in reducing deforestation, suppressing the threat of fires, and restoring vulnerable peatland ecosystems.
At the same time, the regulation will serve as a bridge for resolving tenurial conflicts and increasing the incomes of forest village communities.
Our hope is clear: a future in which Riau’s forests remain intact, peatland landscapes remain wet, and the air we breathe remains clean and free from haze.
We envision a system in which communities living around forests are no longer spectators of poverty, but become the main actors who enjoy prosperity in a fair and sustainable manner.
By making the Social Forestry Regional Regulation a political and moral mandate, we are laying the foundation for genuine sovereignty over natural resources.
Because ultimately, protecting the heart of Riau is the only way to protect the dignity and future of a greener and more dignified Riau.
Susanto Kurniawan, Social Forestry Policy and Partnership Expert
Sources Listed in the Original Article
- Dataloka — Luas Deforestasi Sumatra 2024 Capai 78.030,6 Ha, Riau Tertinggi
- Ministry of Forestry — 2025 fire hotspot data
- BPS Riau Province — Poverty Profile in Riau Province, March 2025