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Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2010 07:33:25 +0700
To: Agus Sari <agus.sari@santalaya.com>, Agnes Safford <agnes.safford@gmail.com>, Lucy Heffern <lucyheffern@gmail.com>
Subject: Fwd: Inside Indonesia: Who Owns The Carbon?: Indonesia’s Carbon Stores Spark International Attention
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Inside Indonesia
No, 101: Jul-Sep 2010
Who owns the carbon?
Indonesia’s carbon stores spark international attention
Jeff Neilson
On 2 February 2010, the Australian Minister for Climate Change, Energy
Efficiency and Water, Senator Penny Wong, announced a A$30 million
allocation to the Indonesia Australia Forest Carbon Partnership
(IAFCP) project in Sumatra’s Jambi province. This added to Australia’s
earlier commitment of a similar amount for conservation and
restoration of carbon-rich peat swamps in Central Kalimantan. Both
projects are part of a joint initiative agreed on by former Australian
Prime Minister Rudd and Indonesian President Yudhoyono in June 2008,
aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and
forest degradation. Widely referred to as REDD, such schemes involve
paying a government or other party to protect or restore forests and
leave forest carbon in situ. . The ‘plus’ in REDD-plus adds
reforestation activities to REDD’s original ‘avoided deforestation’
framework. As part of overall plans to mitigate global warming, both
Australian and Indonesian governments would like to see carbon credits
generated through REDD+ schemes traded in international carbon
markets.
Implementing REDD+ effectively and equitably will face immense
challenges due to complex resource tenure arrangements across
Indonesia’s forest landscapes and problems associated with identifying
legitimate resource users to be compensated through REDD+ payments.
Rights to use natural resources, such as forest lands for timber
extraction or conversion to agriculture, are highly contested in
Indonesia where the government frequently allocates access to
resources otherwise claimed by local communities. At best, these
challenges will frustrate attempts to influence land-use
transformations in a way that actually reduces Indonesia’s carbon
emissions. At worst, REDD+ schemes will exacerbate inequitable access
to natural resources, increase opportunities for corruption and
reverse recent efforts toward local control over natural resources.
Any attempt to reduce deforestation in Southeast Asia should be
applauded. The Terrestrial Carbon Group, an international group of
senior scientists and policy advisors, estimates that deforestation
contributes around 25 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. In
Indonesia, however, up to 85 per cent of emissions come from the
clearing, burning and decomposition of forest and peatland. An
international consensus on the importance of addressing such emissions
is embodied in last December’s Copenhagen Accord, which includes a
platform for REDD+ but leaves specifics to future negotiations.
Meanwhile, forest-rich developing countries are already preparing
REDD+ projects in cooperation with international donors, NGOs,
scientists, corporations and – in some cases – forest dependent
communities.
The Australian government is a keen supporter of REDD+. Last year,
Australia pledged US$120 million toward a US$3.5 billion global fund
aimed at reversing global deforestation. Australia also contributed
A$12 million to the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility
(FCPF) in addition to A$200 million committed to Indonesia under the
IAFCP.
Indonesia also signed the Copenhagen Accord and formally submitted
voluntary emission reduction targets to the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat. By 2020, Indonesia
aims to cut emissions to a level 26 percent below a predicted
business-as-usual scenario. How Indonesia plans to achieve this target
is the topic of much debate and speculation. A billion-dollar deal
between Indonesia and Norway in May 2010 led President Yudhoyono to
announce a national moratorium on commercial forest clearing.
Indonesia’s National Council for Climate Change claims that 87 percent
of this reduction will come from avoided deforestation, improved
peatland management and a variety of carbon sequestration projects.
REDD+ is thus central to Indonesia’s overall climate change mitigation
strategy.
The Indonesian/Australian joint submission to the UNFCCC in August
2009 advocated international carbon markets to stimulate financing for
REDD. Australia’s principal advisor on climate change policy, Ross
Garnaut, argues that Indonesia and Australia should play complementary
roles as seller and buyer of emission credits. The IAFCP aims to help
Australia meet its long-term emission reduction targets by using REDD+
credits generated through forest conservation and tree planting by its
northern neighbour. This apparent self-interest from the Australian
Government has led the Indonesian environmental group WALHI to label
the IAFCP ‘a fraud [that] aims to create a source of cheap credit for
the increase in emissions in Australia’.
The nationalisation of Indonesia’s forests
Implementing REDD+ depends on accurately identifying and mapping who
has legitimate rights over the carbon stored in landscapes. Promoters
of REDD+ presume that carbon rights are linked to established systems
of resource rights. Such rights, however, are highly contested across
Indonesia, with only tentative shifts towards acknowledging community
property and resource use rights since the fall of Suharto.
The Suharto regime’s 1967 Forestry Act effectively nationalised all
forest land in the country, bringing forests (then 70 per cent of
Indonesia’s land area) under Jakarta’s centralised control. This
ushered in more than a decade of unrestrained logging through the
1970s as the Ministry of Forestry granted large-scale concessions to
domestic and international timber companies, regardless of other land
and forest claims, including longstanding claims held by local
communities. Mapping and land use zoning have been important tools
exerting Indonesian state control over natural resources. A parallel
top-down and authoritarian process of provincial spatial planning
began with the 1992 Spatial Planning Act. The lack of community
participation in preparing forest and spatial planning maps laid the
groundwork for future conflicts over state-designated zones for
potential logging, mining and agricultural conversion.
Communities asserted their rights to use formally gazetted state
forests, sparking sporadic conflicts with government agencies during
the Suharto period. Local communities have continued to challenge
state-based territorial claims through Reformasi to the present.
Despite the state’s de jure claims over resources, local communities
have repeatedly negotiated de facto resource access rights based on
deliberations that reflect notions of social equity and ancestral
privileges influenced by customary law. As a result, state-designated
forest zones rarely match actual resource uses.
The Regional Autonomy reforms of 1999 conferred significant authority
on provincial and district governments to manage natural resources.
However, a revised Forestry Law (Law No.41/1999) contradicts parts of
the Regional Autonomy Laws, leading to the past decade of ambiguity
over which levels of government have authority to allocate land and
forest rights. Decentralisation has spawned a paradox of uneven
recognition of local land rights and community-based forestry on one
hand, and a flurry of locally-issued logging licences and a boom in
timber extraction, legal and illegal, on the other.
Rights for forest-dependent communities in Jambi?
WWF estimates that a staggering 85 per cent of Sumatra’s original
forest has been cleared or converted to agriculture. Large-scale
deforestation in Jambi dates to about 1980, when Forestry and
Agriculture ministries started carving the province into a mosaic of
logging and plantation concessions. Logged-over areas were planted
with rubber, and more recently oil palm, which together now cover 40
percent of Jambi’s land. A recently proposed Spatial Plan recommends
that only 30 percent of Jambi’s land be reserved as ‘Protection
Forest’ or ‘Nature Conservation Areas’, the minimum required by law.
In March 2009, Indonesia’s Forestry Ministry recognised 2356 hectares
of Protection Forest, adjacent to Lubuk Beringin in Jambi’s Bungo
District, as Indonesia’s first village-administered forest, fully
integrating control over forest rights into Indonesia’s uniform
administrative village structure. A village council is responsible for
managing the forest, can approve use rights including logging and
non-timber forest product collection and makes decisions about forest
land development. Forest management at the village level also empowers
the village to use social sanctions against violators of village
forest rules - considered more effective than punitive sanctions
administered by higher levels of government.
When asked about the benefits of the devolved forest management model
in Lubuk Beringin, one villager replied, ‘the outside world needs the
carbon in our forests, so now we can sell it to foreigners’. Optimism
and knowledge of carbon markets are high. Yet there had been no
specific announcement of REDD+ programs slated for the Lubuk Beringin
land. As a pioneer of forest devolution and community based forest
management in Indonesia, potential REDD+ programs in Lubuk Beringin
may test whether and how rights over carbon (and financial benefits
flowing from those rights) will accrue to local communities. If
successful, REDD+ could reinforce the tentative shift towards
community forest control in a democratic Indonesia.
Not all of Sumatra’s forest-dependent people have had their resource
claims strengthened in recent years. Jambi is home to the ‘Orang
Rimba’, a distinctive ethnic group of about 6000 individuals whose
livelihoods revolve mainly around hunting and gathering forest
products. The scattered bands of Orang Rimba, also known as Suku Kubu
or Suku Anak Dalam, retain strong taboos that make assimilation with
broader Indonesian society highly problematic. All of the Orang
Rimba’s ancestral lands were designated as state forest, and
effectively taken over by the government under the 1967 Forestry Act,
with no acknowledgement of Orang Rimba traditional land rights. Today,
Orang Rimba are generally permitted to eke out an existence on
government-designated forest lands, but have no legal rights over the
forest resources on which they depend.
Indonesia’s dominant development ideology finds the semi-nomadic
lifestyle of the Orang Rimba abhorrent, and spatial plans routinely
allocate their traditional lands to other ‘more productive’ users. The
greatest concentration of Orang Rimba today lives in Bukit Duabelas
National Park, where they combine hunting and gathering with some
swidden farming and rubber growing. The area was designated a national
park in 2001 with an explicit objective to allow the Orang Rimba to
maintain alternative livelihoods and culture. Such provisions
designated exclusively to a specific ethnic group are not found
elsewhere in Indonesia. This arrangement in Bukit Duabelas, protecting
a cultural homeland for the Orang Rimba, helps retain spiritual ties
with the forest. Resource access, however, is best described as a
‘tolerated right’ and does not imply any specific legal rights.
Communities living outside the park are not so fortunate. Dejected
groups of Orang Rimba west of the park live on ancestral lands that
have been allocated as an oil palm plantation concession. Living in
makeshift tarpaulin camps in an oil palm monoculture, these groups are
unable or unwilling to make the adjustment to sedentary village life
outside the forest. The outlook for these totally dispossessed Orang
Rimba, reduced to begging and handouts after their forest was
destroyed, appears particularly grim. Elsewhere, such as in designated
production forests, Orang Rimba access to forest resources is
currently tolerated, but these groups live under the constant threat
of dispossession once timber concessions are granted.
While a specific IAFCP site in Jambi has yet to be announced, it is
likely that the project would encounter Orang Rimba groups claiming
ancestral rights to forest resources. Private-sector standards for
REDD+ projects developed by international NGOs, such as the Climate,
Community and Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA), attempt to ensure that
rights of indigenous peoples are upheld. Yet how implementation of
REDD+ will ensure that rights of the Orang Rimba are secured remains a
serious challenge, when the legal status of their rights is so
insecure. Protocols for recognising and securing resource rights for
communities, such as the Orang Rimba, remain unresolved and highly
contentious under REDD+ programs.
The road ahead for REDD+
International urgency to identify low-cost ways to slow climate change
has put a spotlight on Indonesia’s forest carbon stores and REDD+
offers potential financing for Indonesian forest conservation.
Optimistically, it might also provide incentives and external pressure
to accelerate recognition of community based rights over forests.
However, despite willingness of organisations and governments in the
‘Global North’ to fund REDD+, investment will be ineffective unless
the underlying institutions governing resource rights aren’t clarified
first. Fast-track recognition of resource rights in an attempt to lure
carbon dollars to Indonesia, without first embedding principles of
social justice, threatens to exacerbate rural poverty and further
undermine indigenous communities’ rights The prospect of REDD+
projects in areas where community land rights are already contested,
or where forest-dependent communities have been recently displaced,
increases the urgency of clarifying tenure in a way that recognises
community-based resource rights.
Jeff Neilson (Jeffrey.neilson@sydney.edu.au) is a lecturer in
geography at the University of Sydney, where he teaches and conducts
research on environmental management and rural development across
Southeast Asia. These reflections are based on a team visit to Jambi
in February 2010 involving researchers from the University of Sydney
and the University of Indonesia.
This article is part of the Indonesia's Environmental Challenges mini-series.
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