A new satellite count reclassifies Japan's wood pellet imports as rainforest, and on that basis Indonesia's tree cover is doing fine, in sheds near Osaka.
A new satellite study counts wood pellets as forest and concludes Indonesia's rainforest has simply moved to Japan. A fictional utility says the carbon-neutral form is stamped, so the tree will grow back eventually. The real worry, the scientist says, is one damp bag.
The pellets are about the size of a thumb joint. They are brown, they are dry, and they smell faintly of a forest that is no longer there. On Saturday we finished working out where that forest went.
We used six satellites. We looked at Indonesia from space for three years and the forest cover fell. Then we pointed the same satellites at Japan. Forest cover there rose sharply, if you count wood that has been pressed into small cylinders and stacked in a warehouse.
We decided to count it. A tree is wood. A pellet is also wood. The only differences are shape, country and temperature. By our method, Indonesia's forests have not been lost at all. They have relocated to Japan, and they are burning.
Other groups have looked at the same region. Their satellite analysis says pellet and chip production is clearing tropical forest, wildlife habitat and the land of Indigenous peoples. We do not dispute their satellites. We only dispute where the forest ended up.
Our sample was six thousand tons of pellets. We followed them from one port in Sumatra to one power station outside Osaka. That is a small sample for a forest. It is a very large sample for a shed.
The control group was a forest we did not cut down. It stayed where it was for the whole study. It produced no electricity and nobody sent an invoice. This confirmed a suspicion we had going in, which is that a standing tree earns nothing.
Our p-value was small. That is a number that tells you how likely a result is to be luck. This was not luck. Somebody arranged it, and they had a shipping schedule.
The paperwork holds
Japan classes wood pellets as carbon neutral. Carbon neutral means the tree will soak the carbon back up when it grows again. The tree is currently ash in a boiler, so that step may take a while.
Hideo Kurata speaks for Kanto Renewable Heat, a utility that burns about six shiploads a month. He said our study matched the company's own view.
"Biomass is renewable because the forest grows back," Kurata said. "None of us has personally watched this happen. But we have all seen the form that says it will, and the form is stamped."
Nusantara Pellet Holdings, which exports from Sumatra, also welcomed the finding. Its spokeswoman Ratna Widodo said the land was still exactly where it had always been. "It is just much easier to see now," she said. "You can drive across it in six minutes."
There is one result that keeps me up at night. On Saturday a single bag of pellets reached Osaka slightly damp. A damp pellet burns badly, and if damp spreads Japan may need another forest. We have checked from space, and there are not many left.
