Science 14Feb2020

722 14 FEBRUARY 2020 • VOL 367 ISSUE 6479 sciencemag.org SCIENCE

PHOTO: ULET IFANSASTI/STRINGER/GETTY IMAGES

A

fter living and working in Indonesia

for about 15 years, French landscape

ecologist David Gaveau suddenly left

the country on 28 January. Indone-

sian immigration authorities had

ordered Gaveau, a research associate

with the Center for International Forestry

Research (CIFOR) in Bogor, on Java, to

leave because of a visa violation.

Gaveau, who also directed a small con-

sulting company on Bali, would not com-

ment on the reason for his departure. But

some colleagues suspect it’s no coincidence

that he was expelled the month after CIFOR

published an estimate of the damage from

Indonesia’s 2019 wildfires that far exceeded

the government’s own numbers. Some see

his deportation as another sign of the grow-

ing tension between the Indonesian govern-

ment and the scientific community. In recent

years, several researchers studying environ-

mental damage from development and fires

have faced government pressure and some

have lost their jobs and their right to stay in

the country. Indonesian scientists have felt

pressure as well. “I am afraid these signs

mean the Indonesian government is starting

to leave science behind,” says Herlambang

Wiratraman, director of human rights law

studies at Airlangga University.

Gaveau is an expert on deforestation and

forest fires who runs the Borneo Atlas and

the Papua Atlas, online platforms that track

changes in land use in industry concessions.

In his analysis of the 2019 fires, based on im-

ages captured by the European Space Agen-

cy’s Sentinel-2 satellite and published in early

December 2019, he concluded that about

1.6 million hectares of forest and degraded

peatlands had burned between January and

October in seven Indonesian provinces.

The numbers upset officials at the Min-

istry of Environment and Forestry (KLHK),

whose research division had concluded

that less than 1.2 million hectares burned

in the same provinces between January and

November. They used data from different

satellites, verified with observations on the

ground, says Raffles Panjaitan, director of

the land and forest fires division at KLHK.

Panjaitan told Science in December 2019 that

Gaveau “clearly made a mistake” by failing

to groundtruth his numbers.

In a meeting with KLHK officials on

4 December 2019, Gaveau admitted his find-

ings were preliminary and had to be veri-

fied, Panjaitan says. CIFOR has pulled the

analysis from its website. “CIFOR’s practice

is to submit our research to the scrutiny of

the peer-review process,” says CIFOR Di-

rector Robert Nasi. “In this case, that prac-

tice was not fully adhered to.” In a tweet

about the fires, environment minister Siti

Nurbaya Bakar later said “unobjective and

invalid data must be countered.”

Since then, KLHK has published revised

estimates closer to Gaveau’s analysis, how-

ever. And it’s not unusual for scientists to

come up with different fire estimates, says

Arief Wijaya, a researcher at the World Re-

sources Institute. “Each methodology has

its own strengths and weaknesses,” he says.

“It is very wrong for KLHK to shun an alter-

native viewpoint,” adds biologist Rosichon

Ubaidillah of the Indonesian Institute of

Sciences (LIPI). “They can’t suppress the

science they don’t like.”

Indonesian immigration authorities

did not respond to requests for informa-

tion about Gaveau’s deportation, but Agus

Justianto, head of KLHK’s research division,

says it was unrelated to the December inci-

dent. A science law adopted last year in Indo-

nesia tightly regulates international research

collaborations (Science, 26 July 2019, p. 304),

and Gaveau “didn’t have the right permit to

do research in Indonesia,” Justianto says.

But Gaveau says it’s not clear the new law

covers his work. “I no longer conduct on-the-

ground research in Indonesia,” he says. “I am

a consultant who provides scientific advice

to a range of international and national insti-

tutions based on free satellite data and other

public data sets.” Other foreigners working

By Dyna Rochmyaningsih

SCIENCE AND POLITICS

Scientists in Indonesia fear political interference

IN DEPTH

Estimates of how much

Indonesian forest and

peatland burned in 2019

are politically sensitive.

French researcher is deported after publishing unwelcome data on wildfires

Published by AAAS