Adianto P. Simamora
The Jakarta Post/Jakarta

Environmental campaigners have praised the government's anti-deforestation, scheme, which aims to lure inter¬national funding by protecting forests and helping reduce carbon emissions.

However, they called on the government to take firm steps to stop deforestation before bringing the concept to the negotiation table at the climate change sum¬mit in Bali.

"It is okay to ask for financial bonuses for protecting forests, but it will be hard for Indonesia to propose such a concept while deforestation continues," Green¬peace campaigner Hapsoro told The Jakarta Post. "The government must first impose a moratorium on defor¬estation to reassure the interna¬tional community about its com¬mitment to protecting forests," he said.

The coordinator of climate change affairs at Indonesia's branch of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Ari Muhammad, said the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing Countries (REDD) initiative would be more effective for Indonesia than the Clean Devel¬opment Mechanism (CDM) in securing international funding from the forestry sector.

"We support the REDD concept as it will be more feasible for Indonesia than the CDM," he told the Post. However, Sofyan Warsito, an environmental economist from Gad j ah Mada University in Yogyakarta, expressed concern that the REDD concept would not work due to the fact the govern¬ment legally provides licenses to clear forests in many areas of the country.

"I would prefer the implemen¬tation of sustainable forest man¬agement to protect our forests rather than REDD as the latter would ban people from cutting down trees in the forest," he told the Post. "Sustainable forest manage¬ment would still allow people to cut down trees in forests if they were replanted," he said.

Indonesia will host the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change conference (UNFCCC) in Bali from Dec. 3 to 14, during which the REDD con¬cept is likely to be proposed. Under the concept, Indonesia and other nations with tropical forests would cease exploiting for¬est resources. They would also pledge to rehabilitate damaged forests.

In return, wealthy nations would provide funding to compen¬sate them for their efforts. As of September, Indonesia had already won support from Brazil, Cameroon, Colombia, Congo, Costa Rica, the Democratic Republic of Congo, 'Gabon, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea and Peru in regards to the plan.

These countries are home to a large number of the world's remaining tropical rain forests. The Kyoto Protocol recognizes only forestation and reforestation as being part of the forestry sec¬tor's CDM, which requires govern¬ments to supply data regarding their forest conversion efforts dur¬ing the last 50 years.

The protocol defines forestation as the conversion to forest of land that has not been forested for a period of at least 50 years.

Reforestation is defined as the conversion of land to forest after December 1989.

Ari said the government needed to track the roots of deforestation in the country.

"The government must also formulate ways to calculate car¬bon reductions resulting from the prevention' of deforestation," he said.

It is estimated that a hectare of natural forest can store between 300 and 400 tons of carbon dioxide, while a hectare of rubber plantation has the capacity to retain about 75 tons of CO2. Forests have long been a prima¬ry source of income for many peo¬ple in the country. Indonesia has 120 million hectares of forest, of which only 64 percent remains intact.

The government has pointed to rampant illegal logging as being the major cause of deforestation in the country. Between 1985 and 1997, the deforestation; rate was 1.8 million hectares per year.

The rate rose to 2.8 million hectares per year until 2000, and between 2000 to 2006 the rate fell to 1.08 million hectares per year. Emissions caused by changes in forest and land use represent about one-fifth of the world's total emissions.