Traceability-based environmental burden indicators for Indonesia's pulp sector: Corporate-group evidence from forest-risk supply chains

Indonesia’s pulp sector plays a strategic role in global forest-risk commodity trade, yet its commercial scale remains associated with substantial environmental pressures arising from deforestation and concession-related emissions. Existing assessments often examine economic indicators and environmental impacts separately, limiting their ability to identify broader environmental burdens embedded within multi-tier supply chains. This study examines shadow risk in Indonesia’s pulp sector using spatially explicit supply-chain data from the SEI-PCS (Trase) platform for 2015–2022. By linking downstream export indicators with recorded upstream environmental exposure at the corporate-group level, the study derives intensity-based indicators to compare environmental burden relative to commercial scale across dominant actors. The results show that strong sectoral export performance remains associated with substantial recorded environmental burden and that 71.45% of recorded annual deforestation across traced concession portfolios falls outside the annual wood-pulp deforestation classification. At the corporate-group level, the analysis identifies distinct alignment and trade-off profiles, demonstrating that dominant actors differ substantially in recorded environmental intensity. These findings indicate that corporate-group traceability can reveal classification-coverage gaps, strengthen preliminary risk-based environmental scrutiny, and support environmental accountability in the context of Indonesia’s FOLU Net Sink 2030 agenda and expanding deforestation-related due-diligence requirements. The study contributes a traceability-based diagnostic framework that integrates corporate-group mapping, environmental-burden intensity indicators, and sector-level shadow-risk assessment in Indonesia’s pulp supply chain.