CLIMATE-CHANGE talks in Doha this week opened in a mood of pessimism about the chances governments will agree to and implement policies that might limit the rise in global temperature to less than 2ºC. But on December 5th a cheering announcement punctured the gloom: that Indonesia’s government had formally approved the country’s first project under the “REDD” scheme (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation).
Indonesia is one of world’s big emitters of carbon, largely because of logging. REDD, to which Norway has committed $1 billion in Indonesia, in essence pays developing countries not to chop down trees. In this project, known as Rimba Raya (“infinite forest”), an area of forest in Indonesian Borneo the size of Singapore will be preserved. Against the odds, it will not be turned into one of the vast palm-oil plantations that are eating up so much of Borneo and other Indonesian islands.
Investors in the project, which include Gazprom, the huge Russian gas producer, and Allianz, a German financial-services giant, will receive or be able to buy about 104m credits over the 30-year life of the project, each representing a tonne of averted carbon emissions. At current market rates, these would be worth as much as $500m. Money will be ploughed back into projects in the area—clean water, health services, microcredit, eco-tourism, etc.
All this is good news for orang-utans, an endangered species. Several hundred have fled the encroaching oil palms to take refuge in a national park, Tanjung Puting, adjacent to the project. There, a care centre run by Biruté Galdikas, a famous primatologist working in the area since 1971, rehabilitates orang-utan refugees. They should now be able to return to the wild.
Rimba Raya seemed on the verge of going ahead in 2010. Then it stalled and, at one point, the government said its area would have to be cut in half, which would have made it unviable. It faced problems that will dog the dozens of other REDD projects being considered in Indonesia.
Most important, for any plot of land to qualify for REDD, there has to be a real threat to the trees. In this case a big palm-oil company had overlapping concessions, which it has only just agreed to relinquish. Reuters news agency, which last year produced an excellent in-depth report on the project, has given one explanation of the combination of forces that persuaded the palm-oil company to change its approach.
Another fundamental difficulty is that forestry management in Indonesia has long been riddled with corruption, having become part of the machinery of crony capitalism under the long Suharto dictatorship. Moreover, even well-intentioned Indonesian officials doubt whether REDD can match the sort of money that timber and palm-oil barons have to offer.
That Rimba Raya has persisted and won through these obstacles is a tribute to the tenacity of its promoters, a small Hong Kong firm called infiniteEARTH. But their project seemed to have so much in its favour: thorough independent certification; influential investors; its location in Central Kalimantan, nominated as Indonesia’s “pilot” province for REDD; even, in those severely endangered orang-utans, the winning charm of some charismatic megafauna.
So the good news comes with two worrying questions: if a project with so much in its favour faces so much difficulty, what hope is there for the others? And will the governments meeting in Doha do enough to sustain an adequate carbon-credit market?
(Picture credits: Irene Slegt)
source:http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2012/12/indonesias-forests-and-redd?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/palmingoff
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