The latest on land use, livelihoods and environmental services in the tropical forest margins.
Source: http://old.thejakartapost.com/climate/index.php?menu=stories&detail=148
We must ensure that Indonesia’s rural poor benefit rather than suffer from the financial flows for avoiding deforestation, and adapting to climate change, that will likely result from the post-Bali scenarios. Co-authored by Chip Fay, ICRAF Southeast Asia.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007 11:46:39 AM
NUSA DUA, Bali (JP): Never before has the development and the environment discourse shifted so dramatically as in the last six months.
Global recognition of the human contributions to climate change is leading to unprecedented responses from citizens, governments, and private corporations.
An important question is will these responses be too little too late? A more immediate and urgent question is who will be the winners and losers on the new climate change mitigation and adaptation playing field?
By many estimates, Indonesia is one of the world’s leading emitters of carbon dioxide, the most prevalent of the global warming gases. This is due to the large amounts of carbon that are released into the atmosphere through peat and forestland logging and clearing for palm oil and pulp wood plantations.
As the host of the 13th UN Conference of Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, Indonesia is under pressure to demonstrate a real commitment to addressing its land-based emissions of greenhouse gases.
The first and least complicated way for Indonesia to show leadership and significantly reduce land-based emissions is to take steps to protect peat forests from conversion to plantations. This will require a change in Indonesia’s development strategy that currently allows plantation companies to convert forests to establish new plantations.
The second and more complicated approach to reducing land-based emissions is to significantly reduce deforestation.
Keeping in mind the millions of easy dollars that flow from logging operations and natural forest conversion to agriculture, it is clear that this cannot be accomplished without significant compensation to those who forgo the opportunity and perhaps their right to log and convert their forest areas. This is particularly difficult since it is not legally clear just who has the right to forego these opportunities.
Conventional wisdom (status quo) points directly to the central government, forest and agricultural industries and to a somewhat lesser extent, local governments as the stakeholders who will require compensation for the foregone opportunities. Should this prevail, once again we will see millions of rural Indonesians marginalized and under even greater threat of losing their land.
As the World Bank scrambles to take the lead in managing large multilateral funds aimed at addressing the climate crisis, and bilateral development assistance redefines priorities and programs to fit into new climate change mitigation and adaptation frameworks and the voluntary carbon market expands, a question that continues to be ignored is, will this impressive response improve or threaten the lives of local rural peoples?
The recently released UNDP report makes a convincing case of how without serious attention and commitment by the government of Indonesia, its poorest people will suffer most as the climate changes. The report highlights the large amount of investments that will be needed to assist the poor to adapt. What is missing in the presentation is discussion of the political commitment that is required to ensure that Indonesia’s rural poor benefit rather than suffer from the financial flows for avoiding deforestation, and adapting to climate change, that will likely result from the post-Bali scenarios.
The provinces of Papua and West Papua are at this time the best example. They take the position that the land and natural resources of the province are under the ownership of Adat or indigenous communities.
Like most provinces in the “outer islands” the majority of the provincial territory is classified “forest area”. In the case of Papua and West Papua, the designated forest area is more than 95 percent of the land base. This classification, in accordance with the 1999 forest law, falls under the authority of the Ministry of Forestry to determine. The problem originates from what comes next.
According to the same law, “forest area” does not mean “state forest area”. To be classified as a State Forest Area, a given forest must be determined to have no rights existing over the land. The law requires a well-defined process to be implemented by the Ministry of Forestry to determine whether or not any such rights exist in a particular forest area.
Currently, only 10 percent of the 120 million hectares of forest area has been fully gazetted as State Forest Area, leaving the status of the remaining 90 percent of forests undetermined.An equally important provision of the forestry law allows for the existence of “private forests”.
These are areas where land rights over the forest area exist. In the case of Papua, the provincial government clearly states that they view indigenous communities as having land rights over the territories that the Ministry of Forestry has classified as forest areas. As a result, local Papuan communities, by law should have a full say over anything and everything that is planned within their territories. This includes timber concessions, timber plantations, agribusiness such as palm oil estates, and any arrangements that are made to maintain forests through avoided deforestation mechanisms.
A post-Bali challenge for Indonesia will be to legally define and recognize the rights of the end users/beneficiaries, in this case referring to benefits flows derived from reduced emissions from degradation and deforestation (REDD).
Without a legally consistent and verifiable system of benefits flows, any kind of REDD scheme will fail. This will require the recognition of communities who have proprietary rights over the areas in question.
While the evolving legal and policy analysis continues to support the position of local peoples’ rights over their natural resources, particularly land, the resistance from Jakarta remains formidable. This is where a significant change in government policy is required. It is legally consistent and appropriate for the government to devolve responsibility for land titling to the Land Administration Agency (BPN) and the protection of forest functions (biodiversity, hydrology, production, etc) to the Ministry of Forestry.
As REDD funds begin to flow, the question of communal title becomes critical. This deals with the fundamental question of who are the final beneficiaries in the chain. Unless this question is dealt with, the risk of only causing greater conflict over land will increase.
Another question is whether, in the short term, the Indonesian government can manage a working administrative and judicial system that will validate the legal basis for communal title in areas where it matters most.
Only then can financial flows aimed at mitigating and adapting local land use in the context of carbon management be effective and socially just. (Avi Mahaningtyas and Chip Fay)
Avi Mahaningtyas is National Coordinator GEF SGP Indonesia and can be reached at avi@indo.net.id. Chip Fay is Senior Policy Analyst with the Southeast Asia office of the World Agroforestry Center in Bogor, Indonesia and can be contacted at cfay@cgiar.org. The opinion expressed is personal.
Indonesia has proposed that the scope of the REDD scheme include reductions in deforestation and degradation, and greater forest conservation.Separately, the Bogor-based Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) said there would be ample opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emission should the financial incentives be sufficient to flip the political and economic realities that caused deforestation.
“After being left out of the Kyoto agreement, it is promising that deforestation is commanding center-stage at the Bali conference,” CIFOR’s director general, Frances Seymour said in the statement.
“But the danger is that policy makers will fail to appreciate that forest destruction is caused by an incredibly wide variety of political and economic factors that originate outside the forestry sector and require different solution.”
He said that dealing with preventing deforestation in Indonesia, caused by overcapacity in the wood processing industry, was completely different from deforestation stemming from a road project in the Amazon or forest degradation caused by charcoal production in sub-Saharan Africa.
He also calls for a REDD process which is fair to poor forest communities.
“We need to temper the desire for maximum reduction in forest-based carbon emission with regard for the legitimate rights of forest communities to realize income potential of the forestlands,” Seymour said.
“At times there will be trade-offs between reducing carbon emissions and reducing poverty.”
ASB research gets coverage in Australia's Business Spectator
The UN climate summit in Indonesia in December 2007 is debating a new worldwide agreement to come into effect in 2012. A major issue will be the clearing of land in areas with tropical forests, which generates a fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions. Brent Swallow of the World Agroforestry Centre has calculated that an expenditure of $US5 per tonne of carbon emissions to be paid by industrialised nations would have been sufficient to avoid the deforestation of four-fifths of these areas in the period since 1990. This equates to about 50% of the price paid on emissions trading exchanges in the EU, and the overall market for such forest preservation credits could be worth $US23bn ($A26bn)
Tuesday, 04 Dec 2007 12:54
Carbon trading has the potential to halt the destruction of rainforests, new research has claimed.
While deforestation in tropical countries is often driven by the “perverse” economic reality that forests are worth more dead than alive, the emerging market for carbon credits could “radically” alter the situation, experts have said.
Researchers claim people in forested regions of developing countries could earn substantially more from carbon offsetting if forests were left intact and incorporated in such a system.
Carbon offsetting involves companies in developed countries calculating their total emissions and then purchasing so-called carbon credits from emission reduction projects in order to offset their impact on the environment.
A study presented at the United Nations (UN) conference on climate change in Bali, Indonesia finds European buyers of carbon credits are currently paying around $35 (£17) for an offset tied to a one-ton reduction in carbon.
It suggests forested communities could exploit the demand in order to provide an alternative and more substantial source of income to deforestation.
The report, which looked at the financial gains generated from deforestation in areas of south-east Asia, central Africa and the Amazon Basin over a period of between ten and 20 years, finds ventures which prompted the destruction of forests rarely generated more than $5 (£2.40) for every ton of carbon they released and frequently returned less than $1 (£0.50).
According to the Partnership for Tropical Forest Margins, a global partnership of organisations that aims to tackle deforestation and poverty which led the research, rewarding communities for carbon stored in their forests could help reduce the number of trees cut down for economic gain.
“Deforestation is almost always driven by a rational response to what the market values and for some time now, it has just made more financial sense to many people in forested areas to cut down the trees,” said Brent Swallow, head of the study.
“What we discovered is that returns for deforestation are generally so paltry that if farmers and other land users were rewarded for the carbon stored in their trees and forests, it is highly likely that a large amount of deforestation and carbon emissions would be prevented,” he added.
The study, which was released this week at UNFCC Conference of Parties (COP-13) in Bali, compared the financial gains generated by deforestation over the last 10 to 20 years in areas of Southeast Asia, Central Africa and the Amazon Basin-most of it driven by a desire for farm land or timber-to the amount carbon that was released by the destruction. That comparison has become critically important because many industries in developed countries are set to spend billions of dollars to meet new requirements for curbing greenhouse gases by purchasing carbon "credits" tied to reductions elsewhere.
The study was conducted by the World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF), the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), and the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA), four of the15 centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), and their national partners
The researchers-who conducted the study under the Partnership for Tropical Forest Margins (ASB)-found that in most areas studied, the various ventures that prompted deforestation rarely generated more than $5 for every ton of carbon they released and frequently returned far less than US $1. Meanwhile, European buyers are currently paying 23 euros-about US $35-for an offset tied to a one-ton reduction in carbon.
"Deforestation is almost always driven by a rational response to what the market values and for some time now, it has just made more financial sense to many people in forested areas to cut down the trees," said Brent Swallow, leader of the study and Global Coordinator of the Partnership for Tropical Forest Margins. "What we discovered is that returns for deforestation are generally so paltry that if farmers and other land users were rewarded for the carbon stored in their trees and forests, it is highly likely that a large amount of deforestation and carbon emissions would be prevented."
Developing new incentives for reducing carbon emissions stemming from deforestation is high on the agenda in Bali. Deforestation is rampant in places like Indonesia, the Amazon and the Congo. Currently, confusion over how to value and monitor the large amounts of carbon stored in tropical forests has prevented the inclusion of forests in the carbon offset market that is mainly dominated by reductions achieved in the industrial sector, even though deforestation is responsible for some 20 percent of the world's carbon emissions.
"We understand that allowing people in forested regions of developing countries to participate in carbon markets presents major challenges, but it's naive to think that conservation is going to occur absent a market incentive," said Meine van Noordwijk, Southeast Asia Regional Coordinator of the World Agroforestry Centre (known by its acronym ICRAF). "Everyone has a stake in finding a way to make it work because it's hard to see how any global effort to combat climate change will succeed if it ignores a major source of the problem."
Van Noordwijk and his colleagues arrived at their conclusions on the economics of deforestation after examining the trade-offs between carbon and financial returns in three areas in Indonesia, and one area each in Peru and Cameroon, all of which have undergone extensive deforestation.
They found that in most instances at the sites in Indonesia, deforestation returned less than $5 per ton of carbon released and in some areas, less than $1. For example, in forested areas rich in peat, which is particularly efficient at trapping carbon, the figure was about $0.10 to $0.20 per ton.
Meanwhile, an analysis of deforestation in the Amazonian forests of the Ucayali Province of Peru produced similar results. Most of the deforestation, which was mainly driven by a desire for crop land, generated less than US $5 per ton of carbon released. The Cameroon study sites produced a better return. Deforestation returns about US $11 per ton of carbon emissions, which is mainly due to an increase in secondary forest and the fact that in Cameroon, cocoa production-which elsewhere has decimated tropical forests-has tended to occur within forests, and resulted in more in forest degradation than outright deforestation.
The report notes that offering economic rewards for carbon storage could be effective not only at encouraging conservation but also at encouraging activities in deforested areas that can recoup at least some of the lost carbon. For example, research shows that agroforestry, which encourages a broader use of trees on farms, can offer a win-win situation of improving smallholder incomes and absorbing carbon.
Dennis Garrity, Director General of the Nairobi, Kenya-based World Agroforestry Centre said that, "Not only does agroforestry have the potential to store carbon, it also addresses the need for alternative livelihoods amongst populations who currently benefit from deforestation."
Researchers caution that despite the clear benefits to be derived from assigning carbon credits to conserving forests, implementing a forest-based carbon market will be complicated.
"The challenge will be to ensure that payments for maintaining forests actually reach local people, and do not end up in the wrong pockets," said Frances Seymour, Director General of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) based in Indonesia.
"For the system to be effective, we will need new mechanisms for allocating payments that are efficient as well as fair," Seymour said.
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About the CGIARThe Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), established in 1971, is a strategic partnership of countries, international and regional organizations and private foundations supporting the work of 15 international agricultural research Centers. In collaboration with national agricultural research systems, civil society and the private sector, the CGIAR fosters sustainable agricultural growth through high-quality science aimed at benefiting the poor through stronger food security, better human nutrition and health, higher incomes and improved management of natural resources. www.cgiar.org.
About ICRAF
The World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) is the international leader in the science and practice of integrating ‘working trees' on small farms in rural landscapes. The Centre works in more than 20 countries across Africa, Asia and South America. www.worldagroforestrycentre.org.
About CIFOR
Headquartered in Indonesia, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) (http://www.cifor.cgiar.org) is a leading international forestry research organization established in response to global concerns about the social, environmental, and economic consequences of forest loss and degradation.
About CIAT
For more information, please visit: www.ciat.cgiar.org/
About IITA
For more information, please visit: www.iita.org
About Partnership for the Tropical Forest Margins
For more information, please visit: www.asb.cgiar.org