A Rainforest Frontier Driving a New Era of Landscape Conservation
This milestone report highlights ten years of RAN’s efforts to protect Indonesia’s globally important Leuser Ecosystem. Through desktop research, supply chain investigations, grassroots campaigns and corporate negotiations, RAN has exposed the big brands, including Mondelēz, Procter and Gamble, Nestlé and many others, responsible for the destruction of its biodiverse rainforests and carbon rich peatlands for palm oil expansion. Over years, these efforts have helped turn the Leuser region into a proving ground for responsible palm oil production and landscape-level, multistakeholder conservation initiatives.
This emerging approach to multistakeholder initiatives in Aceh and North Sumatra brings together national, provincial and local governments, civil society, global brands, palm oil traders and smallholder farmers to work toward long-term solutions for the Leuser Ecosystem, and the local communities that depend on its forests for their livelihoods. It’s a growing, scalable strategy that shows how cooperation can keep forests standing while protecting community rights.
Ten years ago, Rainforest Action Network (RAN) responded to an urgent call from frontline allies in Indonesia. Fires, set illegally to clear land for industrial palm oil, were tearing through the Tripa peat swamp—home to one of the world’s densest populations of critically endangered Sumatran orangutans and other iconic species. The destruction ignited a campaign that would grow into one of the most sustained and strategic rainforest protection efforts in our history: the fight to save the Leuser Ecosystem.
Spanning over 6.5 million acres on the island of Sumatra, the Leuser is the last place on Earth where orangutans, tigers, elephants, and rhinos still coexist in the wild. It’s also a lifeline for millions of people and a globally significant carbon sink. Yet, the ecosystem has long been under siege—from industrial palm oil expansion, illegal logging, and corporate land grabs. RAN’s strategy was clear: expose the culprits, activate public pressure, and force the world’s largest corporations—brands, traders, and banks—to take responsibility.
Read RAN’s report 10 Years in the Leuser Ecosystem: A Rainforest Frontier Driving a New Era of Landscape Conservation, which outlines how RAN’s efforts have helped turn the Leuser region into a proving ground for an innovative approach to landscape conservation that involves investments by big global companies into initiatives that involve governments, civil society and smallholder farmer groups working together to achieve robust forest monitoring, responsible palm oil production, and enduring conservation solutions. The hope is that these emerging initiatives can be a scalable model that can be adapted and applied to other regions in Indonesia and other forest-risk commodity supply chains globally.