(WRI invited the Sarawak State Forest Department to share information for inclusion on Global Forest Watch, but they did not respond). While the resulting datasets are likely incomplete, they represent the most comprehensive and interactive picture of the distribution of concessions across Sarawak to date. This data was assembled from official documents in the public domain, including two State Forestry Department (SFD) 2010 maps, and supplemented with information from Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs). These maps show the presence and extent of industrial forest timber licenses, oil palm concessions and license planted forests (LPF). The new data launched by GFW offers the first detailed look at the extent of industrial concessions in Sarawak. According to new maps of industrial logging, oil palm, and planted forest concessions complied and published by Global Forest Watch, these concessions cover over half the state of Sarawak, often overlapping with sensitive intact forests that are being exploited and degraded at one of the highest rates in the world. It is not surprising that Sarawak wanted to keep this information opaque. Official maps of logging, oil palm and wood fiber concessions for Sarawak are hard to come by the government does not publish this data in a publicly usable format. Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the historically richly forested island of Borneo suffers from high rates of deforestation, but understanding this dynamic is made difficult by government secrecy and lack of transparency.
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