In new take on carbon-trading, Indonesia may get paid to save trees

An environmental summit in Bali next month will probe incentives for countries to preserve forests.

By Simon Montlake | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the November 14, 2007 edition

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Jakarta, Indonesia - For decades, conservationists have sought to halt the wholesale clearance of Indonesia's tropical rainforests by loggers and plantation companies. But repeated calls for sustainable forestry practices to safeguard biodiversity haven't succeeded in stopping the chain saws.

Now, help may be arriving in the shape of a carbon-trading program that would effectively pay Indonesia and other forest-rich countries not to chop down their trees. Behind the initiative is the potential monetary value – as yet unrealized – of tropical forests as vast stocks of carbon that the industrialized world can offset against greenhouse-gas emissions.

Advocates of carbon-credit trading want to put these forests into play as policymakers prepare for a major UN climate-change summit next month on the island of Bali. The summit will chart a course for a successor treaty to the Kyoto protocol on capping emissions after it expires in 2012. Given the growing consensus on the extent of manmade global warming, any future rules are likely to be much tougher.

As the UN summit's host, Indonesia is backing proposals to add credits from "avoided deforestation" to post-Kyoto rules. Currently, carbon offsets are only available for tree-planting, not preservation. But the destruction of tropical forests in Indonesia, including the draining and burning of peatland to clear land for plantation crops such as palm oil, releases so many tons of carbon that Indonesia ranks in third place behind the US and China as the top emitters of greenhouse gases, according to the World Bank. Brazil, the custodian of much of the Amazon basin, is also in the top five. The World Wildlife Fund attributes 20 percent of global carbon emissions to forest fires – more than airplanes, cars, and ships combined.

A boom in palm oil has encouraged companies to expand plantations, in part because of demand for biofuel. Indonesia is the world's largest producer of palm oil, a fact that underpins, say environmental campaigners, another superlative: the fastest rate of deforestation on the planet. Around 1.8 million hectares are cleared annually, much of it illegally for timber exports and feedstock for pulp and paper mills.

This sobering fact has drawn interest from conservationists who have watched Indonesia's forests vanish steadily despite successive donor-funded efforts to save them. They reckon that carbon trading could help slow the destruction, if conservation programs are performance-based and properly verified and implemented.

"We've been using development money to try to save the forests in Indonesia for 20 years and it's failed, let's face it. Why not try a [carbon] market mechanism?" says Frank Momberg, director of programs in Asia for Flora & Fauna International.

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