Indonesia’s B50 biodiesel target needs up to 8.55 million hectares of land conversion, Nature Sustainability study finds

Meeting Indonesia’s B50 biodiesel target will require between 4.85 and 8.55 million hectares of land conversion, according to a study published in Nature Sustainability on 31 August 2026. The paper, “Land-use optimization for food security, bioenergy and forest conservation in Indonesia”, also finds that pursuing rice self-sufficiency at the same time could convert up to 2.3 million hectares, with what the authors call “notable overlap between food and energy production zones”. The Indonesia B50 biodiesel programme and the rice push are therefore competing for the same ground.

Eight of the nine authors are at the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland, with Agus Sari of Landscape Indonesia in Jakarta as the ninth. Claire V. Squire is first author and Jiehong Lou is corresponding author. The paper was received on 4 April 2025 and accepted on 23 July 2026, and its data and code are published on GitHub. No press release accompanied it, and Winss found no independent coverage as of 1 September 2026.

What the modelling says about the Indonesia B50 biodiesel land bill

The authors combine an improved high-resolution land cover map, multicriteria evaluation and production scenario modelling to test where the crops could go. The design crosses three land constraints against a set of production scenarios. The constraints are Concessions, which confines expansion to existing oil palm concessions and designated food estate areas; Open Development, which allows any land not otherwise excluded; and Forest Protection, which excludes primary forest, degraded forest, plantation forest and peatland. The oil palm scenarios run B35, B40 and B50; the rice scenarios run Reduced Imports, Self-Sufficiency and Exporter.

The published abstract gives the emissions consequence in ranges: 360 to 3,753 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent for oil palm and 509 to 1,297 million tonnes for rice, which the authors write “could surpass historic emissions events”. The scenario-level breakdown below comes from the openly available preprint version of the paper, whose headline figures match the published abstract exactly.

Ranges from the preprint “Indonesia’s land use dilemma”, Research Square, May 2025. Land ranges span the B35 to B50 blend scenarios; emissions ranges span the rice and palm production scenarios.

Two points matter for reading those numbers. The low end of the land range, 4.85 million hectares, is the B35 case rather than the B50 case, because requirements grow with the blending rate. And the 2.3 million hectare rice figure corresponds to the Exporter scenario rather than to self-sufficiency alone. The emissions spread is where the constraint choice bites hardest.

That result is counterintuitive and is the study’s core finding. Staying inside the legal concession footprint is not the same as staying off carbon-rich land. For scale, the preprint puts average annual emissions from biomass conversion at 264.3 MtCO2e, and notes that under the Concessions constraint at B50 the peatland converted would exceed the area of peat burnt between June and October 2015. Peer-reviewed estimates put the 2015 fire peak at 692 plus or minus 213 teragrams of CO2 for September and October alone.

The mandate arrived four years early

The study models “achieving the biodiesel B50 target by 2030”. Indonesia got there in July 2026. The Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources confirmed on 18 June 2026 that the B50 mandate would start on 1 July, and President Prabowo Subianto launched it on 9 July 2026 at a rest area on the Jakarta-Cikampek toll road in Karawang, West Java, alongside Minister Bahlil Lahadalia. The ministry describes Indonesia as the first country to mandate a 50 per cent blend nationwide.

Rollout is not finished. Eniya Listiani Dewi, director general for new and renewable energy, told Antara on 31 August 2026 that B50 distribution had reached 75 to 80 per cent nationwide and 90 per cent at Pertamina stations, with full coverage targeted for 1 October 2026.

Blend sequence as published by Kementerian ESDM, 9 July 2026.

The paper was accepted three weeks after the mandate took effect but retains the 2030 framing. Its land and emissions figures therefore describe a process already under way rather than a distant scenario. The energy ministry’s own two releases give different projections for the same policy: 157.28 trillion rupiah of foreign exchange savings and 46.72 million tonnes of avoided emissions in the June release, against 170 trillion rupiah and 44.46 million tonnes in the July release.

On the food side, Prabowo declared rice self-sufficiency achieved on 7 January 2026, and Indonesia halted rice, sugar and corn imports for the year from 1 January. The government put 2025 rice production at 34.71 million tonnes. Domestic critics have disputed the self-sufficiency claim, and Winss has not verified those objections independently.

Where the pressure is already showing

Indonesia is the world’s largest palm oil producer. The USDA puts its 2025-26 output at 46.70 million tonnes of an 81.46 million tonne world total, about 57 per cent, with Malaysia second at 20.20 million tonnes. Official BPS data record 45.44 million tonnes produced in calendar 2024 across a planted area of 16.01 million hectares, of which smallholders hold 42.9 per cent.

Forest loss moved in the wrong direction last year while the global trend improved. World Resources Institute analysis of University of Maryland data recorded 295,596 hectares of Indonesian primary forest loss in 2025, up 14.2 per cent from 258,812 hectares in 2024, against a 36 per cent fall in tropical primary forest loss worldwide. WRI attributed the rise to agricultural expansion and mining, naming the food estate programme in South Papua. Palm is not currently the main driver: Nusantara Atlas put palm-driven deforestation at 31,073 hectares in 2025, roughly a tenth of the primary forest loss total, though Papua’s share doubled to 7,333 hectares. The study’s concern is what a 50 per cent blend does to that balance from here.

Winss has covered the wider trade-offs in oil crops causing 1.5% of global biodiversity loss in an ETH Zurich study, in an assessment of sustainable biofuels in 2025-2026 and their hard limits, and in research that quantifies carbon losses from tropical forest degradation. On the rice side, Mitti Labs raised 9.5 million dollars to scale an AI rice farming platform aimed at measuring methane cuts from changed water management.

Background

Indonesia’s biodiesel programme began as an import-substitution measure. The blend has climbed in eight steps since 2008, funded through a levy on crude palm oil exports administered by the palm oil fund agency, and the feedstock is almost entirely domestic palm oil. Industry body GAPKI reported 12.70 million tonnes of palm oil going to biodiesel in 2025, up 10.97 per cent on the previous year. Each step up the blend ladder raises the share of the crop diverted from food and export markets.

Indonesia submitted its Second Nationally Determined Contribution to the UNFCCC in October 2025. It sets an absolute 2035 emissions level of 1,257,717 to 1,488,866 gigagrams of CO2 equivalent against a 2019 reference of 1,145,037 gigagrams, so both target levels sit above the reference year. The country also runs a separate FOLU Net Sink 2030 target of minus 140 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent from forestry and other land use by 2030. The Nature Sustainability paper does not model policy compliance, but its Forest Protection constraint is the only one of the three whose modelled palm emissions stay in the same order of magnitude as those commitments.

Sources: Nature Sustainability; Research Square; Center for Global Sustainability, University of Maryland; GitHub; Kementerian ESDM; Kementerian ESDM; Antara News; Kementerian Pertanian; World Resources Institute; Nusantara Atlas; USDA Foreign Agricultural Service; Scientific Reports; UNFCCC

Featured image: photo by Mohan Nannapaneni on Pexels (free Pexels license).

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Figen Sekin

I specialize in sustainability education, curriculum co-creation, and early-stage project strategy. At WINSS, I craft articles on sustainability, transformative AI, and related topics. When I’m not writing, you’ll find me chasing the perfect sushi roll, exploring cities around the globe, or unwinding with my dog Puffy — the world’s most loyal sidekick.