“We do need cooperation with others to achieve common goals. Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much,” said Indonesia’s Coordinating Minister of Maritime and Investment Affairs, Luhut Binsar Panjaitan, shortly before the G20 Summit in Bali began last month.

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From Illegal logging to tree conservation: one man’s journey to help end deforestation in Vietnam

From Illegal logging to tree conservation: one man’s journey to help end deforestation in Vietnam

Under the deal, the three countries will together try to determine the price of a tonne of carbon, which firms in many countries can buy to offset emissions.

Last year Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s biggest economy, said it would implement a carbon tax of US$2.10 per tonne of carbon on coal plants. This is cheaper than what is being offered by Western countries – in France, it is US$49.30 per tonne – but comparable to Asian countries, including Japan’s US$2.40 or Singapore’s US$3.70.

The tax was supposed to be imposed in April this year, but Jakarta delayed the plan indefinitely, in part because of problems in the global energy market caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Kiki Taufik, head of Greenpeace Southeast Asia’s Indonesian forests campaign, welcomed the alliance but said any deal based on carbon markets was a “fake solution”.

“Carbon markets is a good initiative as big companies and countries in the Global North can provide money to Indonesia and other countries by buying their carbon credits, but this can’t be a permanent solution,” Kiki said.

“At the same time, they [firms, countries in Global North] still produce large emissions, rich people are still using their private jets, they use fossil energy as they please. They can do all this and then claim they have already paid money to developing countries. That doesn’t solve the climate crisis problem.”

All about the money?

Unlike Brazil and Congo, Indonesia has been able to curb its deforestation rate in the last five years. The 202,905 hectares of primary forest it lost last year was a lot but was nevertheless a 25 per cent drop on the amount that disappeared in 2020. Environmental organisation World Resources Institute said this showed the Indonesian government’s efforts to tackle deforestation were working.

These include increased fire monitoring and prevention efforts following vast forest and peat fires in 2015 and a moratorium on primary forest and peatland conversion. The moratorium, permanent since 2019, dictates that more than 60 million hectares of primary forest and peatland cannot be cleared for palm oil plantations and logging operations.

The alliance is not the only source of money from which Jakarta can be rewarded for its success fighting deforestation. In October, Norway agreed to pay US$56 million to Indonesia for preventing 11.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from being released from its rainforests in 2016-2017.

In September, both countries signed a deal whereby Norway will financially support Indonesia’s ambitious Forestry and Other Land Use (FOLU) Net Sink 2030 plan. It aims to ensure rainforests will absorb 140 million metric tonnes more CO2 than they emit by 2030.

Indonesia also aims to see its carbon emissions peak by the same year and progress towards net-zero emissions by 2060. During the G20 summit last month the nation, which relies heavily on coal, signed a US$20 billion climate deal with Japan, United States and other Western countries to bring forward its net-zero target in its power sector by a decade, to 2050.

G20: Indonesia signs US$20 billion deal for ‘promising path’ to clean energy

However, Indonesia’s gain in curbing deforestation could be threatened by President Joko Widodo’s infrastructure drive, which may sacrifice the forests to boost the nation’s economy, conservationists warned.

“Behind the ambitious plan to reduce emissions, especially in the FOLU sector, there is a development plan that may sacrifice natural forests in Indonesia. The threat of deforestation in Indonesia comes more from within, not from outside [because] the government still has a view that development requires deforestation,” said Mufti Barri, executive director at environmental organisation Forest Watch Indonesia.

Last month, Greenpeace Indonesia released a report that showed that the government’s planned food programme threatens indigenous territory in Borneo – a huge island, most of it under Indonesia’s jurisdiction – as well as crucial biodiversity as it may involve grabbing 3.2 million hectares of land in Papua, the western half of New Guinea island, also controlled by Jakarta.

Jakarta initiated the large-scale agricultural scheme to respond to food supply concerns at the start of the pandemic and reduce food imports.

Furthermore, a research paper in September in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looked at the effects of large-scale mining in the tropical forests of 26 countries between 2000 and 2019.

It showed that Indonesia accounted for 58.2 per cent of deforestation directly caused by industrial mining, in ‘first place’ among the 26 nations with 1,901km square of forest areas lost, followed by Brazil with 327km, Ghana with 213km and Suriname with 203km.

Coal extraction in the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan, on Borneo, was key. Plus, it hosts the construction site of future national capital city Nusantara, an area once covered by rainforest. Borneo’s rainforests are among the oldest in the world.

“External funding is not the main [indicator] in our success or failure in reducing the rate of deforestation. The success must be demonstrated by maintaining sources of livelihood and guaranteeing the safety of lives, so that people won’t become anxious that disasters may occur from losing their forests,” Mufti said.

Learning from each other

In the new alliance, Brasilia can learn from Jakarta how to implement forest-friendly policies, like the primary forest moratorium, Kiki said.

“On the other hand, Indonesia can learn how to introduce effective measurement, reporting, and verification processes from Brazil. They used to have a good mechanism in place to monitor their forests, and this tool is accessible to the public,” Kiki said.

“In Indonesia, we don’t have that kind of transparency. The public cannot access databases of companies that possess cultivation or rights or concessions, even though … they are public data.”

Under the new alliance the three countries should deliver a mechanism for monitoring forest areas in an accountable, credible and transparent manner, as this will make it easier for them when they have a carbon market programme, Kiki added.

The ‘rainforests cartel’ also still needs to elaborate on how its new carbon market mechanism would benefit indigenous communities in the three countries, conservationists have said.

Oscar Soria, campaign director in the US-based non-profit Avaaz, which promotes activism on climate change issues, said the three nations have not yet said how they will increase the protection of indigenous environmental activists.

“Indigenous people and local communities are not really treated as partners by these central governments, their rights are not respected, they’re often murdered in impunity; how would [the alliance] change this?” Soria said on Twitter.

He said indigenous representatives and communities learned about the new protective alliance in the media, “like everybody else. While this is their land we’re talking about, and while they are already doing the job, usually despite (not thanks to!) actions from central governments”.