One landscape, two claims on the same ground.

South Papua became Indonesia’s newest province under Law No. 14/2022. As one of its first statutory obligations, it needed an RPPLH (an Environmental Protection and Management Plan) precisely as the national Food Estate program began staking out land inside it. Indonesia is megabiodiverse and already exposed to the triple planetary crisis (climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss); a new province writing its first environmental plan while a large land-conversion program moves in is not a routine timing.

The Food Estate program targets 1.2 million hectares across six districts (Merauke, Tanah Miring, Semangga, Kurik, Janggebob, and Malind), part of a national push toward food self-sufficiency (Asta Cita 2). None of that land is empty: it sits inside a landscape already organized around sago groves, sacred sites, and customary conservation areas that predate the program by generations. That is the same kind of remote-sensing-derived land classification that the Cikarang industrial-settlement study runs on Google Earth Engine, applied here to ecosystem services instead of building footprints.

The RPPLH is structured around the DPSIR framework (Driver, Pressure, State, Impact, Response), the standard planning lens for tracing how a development driver turns into environmental pressure and, eventually, a policy response. On top of it, KLHK’s 2022 ecosystem-service scoring gives that framework real numbers: how much of the Food Estate footprint is high-value for food production versus biodiversity support.

74.63% of the 2.3-million-hectare study area scores class-4 (high) for food-provisioning ecosystem services, exactly what makes it attractive for Food Estate. But 67.88% of that same area also scores class-5 (very high) for biodiversity and habitat support, meaning the most food-productive land is simultaneously the most ecologically irreplaceable and the most vulnerable to conversion. That is the same ordinal-tier classification, from a weighted score down to a small number of ranked classes, that sorts kecamatan into Hierarki 1/2/3 in the Jabung sub-region hierarchy study.

Seven categories of customary and sacred space were mapped inside the development area: sacred sites alone account for 158,514 hectares, sago groves (a subsistence and cultural staple) for 110,358, customary conservation areas for 85,857, water sources, ancestral pathways, ancestor resting places, and old/sacred kampung for the rest. None of these were incidental findings; each was digitized and measured against the Food Estate boundary specifically.

Field verification found rice already planted at Desa Telaga Sari, with irrigation infrastructure under construction, and sugarcane at Distrik Kurik feeding a bioethanol cluster near Kota Terpadu Mandiri Salor. Two hundred excavators landed at a closed former fishing port at Wanam to start road works, a planned 140-km, 35-meter-wide route between Ilwayab, Wanam, Ngguti, and Muting, of which only 5 km carries environmental permits (UKL/UPL) and 135 km has no AMDAL at all. In the deep swamp sections, clearing has already spread to roughly a kilometer wide.

Orang Asli Papua communities in the area already practice Sasi, a customary ritual, observed by every marga and its chief, that restricts resource extraction from a site for up to 1,000 days to let wildlife and vegetation regenerate. The RPPLH’s DPSIR “Response” stage points to documenting and folding that local knowledge into Food Estate planning directly, rather than treating conservation and development as a choice the program makes without it. That is the same shift, from a one-off report to a tool a planning team keeps using, that Kalimantan Timur’s poverty mapping is making with its own live web GIS follow-up.