Omar Hamed Beato is a visual journalist from Spain covering conflict, climate change, migration, and social issues. You can find him on Instagram and follow his work here.
It is a blistering afternoon in the mangrove forest of Langsa, a town located on the eastern shores of Aceh province, at the northernmost tip of the island of Sumatra. The dry season has now kicked into full gear as the relentless sun beats down the small patrol boat organized by locals who try to deter illegal logging. After hours of sailing around the forest, a bang noisier than the boat’s own engine can be heard in the background. It is only getting louder. It is an illegal logger cutting some branches of a mangrove tree.
”Stop! What are you doing?,” one of the members of the boat patrol shouts at the logger across the distance.
By the time the patrol reached the area, the logger had managed to flee with the wood. It is a hopeless scene they all are too familiar with. The mangrove has been destroyed and their boat can’t keep up with the logger on his more powerful boat. ”We always lose,” one of the members of the patrol said as they gave up on the chase. ”We can only scare them away,” he said.
Indonesia has the biggest share of mangrove forests than any other country on earth, accounting for about a quarter of the world’s mangroves. This kind of forest is essential to the fight against climate change as globally they store 11 billion tons of carbon — the equivalent of the CO2 emissions over 5.4 billion homes in a year in the United States — and their storage capacity is four times that of other tropical forests. Mangroves also provide critical habitat for countless bird and fish species, while supporting the livelihoods of Indigenous communities who have coexisted with these environments for generations.
In Aceh — notorious for its implementation of Sharia Law — the coastal town of Langsa has not been spared from forest loss. Over the past few decades, about 86 percent of its mangrove cover has been destroyed to make way to palm oil plantations, urban areas, or cut down by the logging industry. While the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed more than 140,000 people in the province (and killed a total death toll of 230,000 around neighbouring countries), the villages that preserved their mangrove forest suffered less damages and fewer deaths than those that had converted them for other uses. In response, a group of locals formed boat patrols in 2016 to bring illegal loggers to justice and deter the growing illegal logging business. Operating under Adat law, or Indigenous customary law, they now guard a mangrove area of 255 hectares — roughly the size of 350 football fields.
”We had so many mangroves before but a lot of people cut off the trees. That’s why a lot of local people feel sad. A lot of people think that the trees are given by God and have the right to take them. From when I was a kid until 2016, we have lost 70 percent of mangroves but because we have been planting mangroves back we are now at 50 percent loss,” says Jaiful Anwar, the 53-year-old head of the Kelompok Tani Hutan Bangka Bantimoh or Growing Mangrove Forest Farmers Group which organizes the patrols. ”There is a lot of conflict between local people and those who cut the mangroves. Three years ago, I was on patrol and the loggers came to attack me with a machete, but we ran away,” he recalled.
Despite their best efforts to arrest the loggers and bring them to local courts, Anwar is aware that with their lack of resources, it is nearly impossible to completely stop illegal logging. ”In 2016, we asked the government to give us a speed boat but in 2020, the speed boat broke and now we always lose in the patrols because we don’t have a fast enough boat,” Anwar explained.
According to the Aceh Wetland Foundation (AWF), an NGO founded in 2010 to protect marine areas in Aceh from being erased by development projects, the government is not doing nearly enough to protect the 45,000 hectares of protected mangroves in the province due to a lack of resources. “The government has no money, no boats — nothing. They’re lazy and don’t care. They only have rangers, and even those don’t have boats,” says Yusmadi Yusuf, founder of AWF. Locals in Langsa city have pioneered boat patrols as a big share of their local economy relies on the mangrove forest to obtain crabs, shrimps, or other kinds of fisheries that are then exported to feed China’s massive seafood market.
”The forest can live without humans, but humans cannot live without the forest,” he says, sipping a cup of mangrove juice under a tent beside the forest.
No easy way out
At a local coffee shop or Warung under the midday sun, fishermen have gathered to discuss possible solutions to the problem. ”The loggers are so dangerous for our livelihood,” says Zaimal Mohammad Yusuf, a 45-year-old fisherman who has been fishing in the city for over 10 years. ”Mangroves are disappearing and we need a solution. I have had violent incidents with the loggers four times now but we haven’t been given a solution by the government — the loggers have no space in our village”
”We want the government to protect our forest. Working is more difficult now. It is harder to find fish because there are less mangroves, we need to navigate for two hours to find fish, before it was only 10 minutes away.”
According to data provided by the local government to International Policy Journal, 27,000 people living in the towns of Langsa, Aceh Tamiang, and Aceh Timur, three of the bordering regencies home to the mangrove ecosystem, work in the illegal logging industry. Many of the loggers are forced into this business due to lack of job opportunities in an area with more than 12 percent of its population living under the poverty line, just above the country’s average of eight percent.
”Some people [can only] find jobs by cutting mangroves,” says Suriyatno, deputy mayor of Langsa city for the last 10 years. ”When people get arrested by Adat law, it says you have to fix what you destroyed. We cannot use Sharia Law because people have to cut the mangroves to stay alive.”
Despite the local government’s efforts to subsidize small canoes and nets to incentivise illegal loggers to switch to fishing, many struggle to change professions due to limited educational opportunities to learn new skills. Abdul Mutallib is one of them. At 70, he has been cutting trees since his childhood — he can’t recall how old he was when he began cutting trees as he followed his father’s footsteps, who also worked in the logging industry. As a father of five and grandfather of 12, Mutallib says the work is increasingly difficult and often unprofitable — some days bringing in nothing, and on others just a single bag of charcoal sold for as little as USD 1.80. “I never considered doing something else. This is the only thing I know how to do. If we got support, I could consider doing something else, but I am too old,” he says, sitting by the river where loggers have set up a camp to turn felled wood into charcoal.
Strongmen politics, the environment, and net zero
Since President Prawobo — a former army general — rose into power in the 2024 elections, he has adopted different pro-industry policies that put the environment at risk of further degradation. Last January, the ministry of forestry proposed the deforestation of 20 million hectares (50 million acres) of forests to make space for crops, an area roughly the same size as the U.S. state of Nebraska or double the size of South Korea. This will not only put a strain on the environment and the communities that rely on it, but also jeopardize the country’s goal to be carbon neutral by 2060, as the country’s yearly greenhouse gas emissions have yet to reach their peak in the upcoming years.
”If the country plans to reach net zero, it basically requires really steep reductions [of emissions] after 2030,” says Jamie Wong, a climate policy analyst at NewClimate Institute, a non-profit focusing on climate policy and sustainability. ”This administration’s goal is to pursue economic growth at all costs. There’s an ambitious eight percent economic growth target a year and what that means is an expansion of extractive activities. In mining, you see the industry expanding its bioenergy visions of increasing biofuel production and that’s coming from palm oil. An expansion in palm oil production requires land and emissions. It seems like the current government’s policy direction and the way that they aim to achieve economic growth is not really compatible with its climate goals or with protecting the environment and halting deforestation.”
What is more, earlier this year, following Donald Trump’s authoritarian playbook, Prawobo authorized a regulation to deploy the country’s armed forces to crack down on illegal forest use, a militarization that has been also present during last week’s anti-government protests when the army was deployed to the streets. This has raised questions about the army cracking down on small farmers and loggers rather than on big corporations that have the ability to bribe government officials. “Judging from the long history of this country, it is easier to regulate, evict and seize people’s land than to reclaim forests and lands that have been illegally or legally but illegitimately controlled by corporations,” explained Uli Arta Siagian, a member of Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), the largest environmental NGO in Indonesia, for Mongabay.
In a statement released by Walhi in February, the NGO stated: “The Minister of Forestry should maximize the role of communities who have been working to protect and restore forests. This full maximization can only be achieved by first recognizing people’s rights to their forests and prioritizing the knowledge and experience of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in and around forest areas who have been working to protect and restore them.”
Until then, safeguarding the mangroves will fall upon the fishermen taking it upon themselves, protecting the environment no matter how hard, hoping for the day their plea for help is heard.
