The
whole thing caught my eye because since the March 2013 realization that
new Governor Zaini Abdullah was planning on re-zoning protected forest to make it
“productive” (ie, a palm oil pipeline) there haven’t been many recent articles
on deforestation in Aceh. Also because
JMD has been trying to get USAID Jakarta’s attention since 2008 and with the
exception of the radar blip of the Deputy Mission Director and “Strategy Implementation
Advisor” being nice to me when I visited their offices to beg for funds in
December 2012, JMD has received bupkus in terms of assistance, returned
emails/phone calls, or even requests to keep us up to date on projects in the
country.
Now,
I don’t want to get USAID mad. JMD needs
their support. But this latest
brainstorm of theirs is just so shockingly naïve (or politically motivated with
respect to extraction interests) that I am hard pressed to think they would
even consider funding a project that actually addressed true and rampant
deforestation, no matter how sweet we are to them. Even the commenters were astounded. The highlighted
text is mine. And a lot of the technical references have been cut—not to
bolster my point because it doesn’t need it, but just so that you will read to
the end, even with some of the jargon in there.
It is really important to know how these programs work, and the fact
that they are in their infancy and yet billions are being thrown at them is
something we all should be concerned about.
The REDD Monitor is. That’s
enough for me.
January
21, 2014
Last week, a small announcement
appeared on the website of the US Embassy in Jakarta: “The United States
government and the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry today launched a new
rainforest standard for carbon credits in West Bali National Park.”
It’s an extraordinary
project. In a country faced with very high rates of deforestation, this is a forest carbon trading
project in a national park.
The project will be carried
out by the University of Columbia, the University of Indonesia and the
Sustainable Management Group with funding from USAID.
Jatna Supriatna, head of
the University of Indonesia’s Research Center for Climate Change, told the Bali
Daily that, “We have set a target that
within the next one year or two, we will have discovered the appropriate and
standardized mechanism to develop carbon credits using the RFS [Rainforest
Standard] system.”
Supriatna explained that
the aim was to sell carbon credits on the voluntary market. Part of the profits
are to be used for conservation of the West Bali National Park.
. . . Tedy Sutedi, head of the park, welcomed the
initiative to designate the park as the pilot project for research, saying that
it would support the park’s management plan to reduce deforestation rates. He
said that based on continuous monitoring, no deforestation occurred in the
park, however, there were some cases of ornamental fish and wood thefts by
locals.
So the National Park already has a management plan aimed
at reducing deforestation rates. And
according to Sutedi, it’s very successful, as there is no deforestation in the Park.
. . .The project developers
have to prove that the project is additional before carbon credits can be sold.
They have to prove that deforestation would have continued or increased in the
absence of the project. That’s going to be tricky under the rules of the
“Rainforest Standard” that the US Embassy mentions in its press release.
. . . In his comment for the Bali Daily,
Zulkifli Hasan, Indonesia’s Foresty Minister, read from Columbia University’s
website: “The Rainforest Standard is
based on the fundamental understanding that the environment, economy, and
society are ‘in it together’.”
At the launch of the
project, Andrew Sisson,
USAID mission director in Indonesia, said that,
“Through this initiative, Indonesia is at the leading
edge of preserving biodiversity and setting conservation standards. We believe
that scientific collaboration between the US and Indonesia can help to address
the challenge of global climate change.”
This claim is ludicrous, based as it is on a project that
has yet to start and which is aimed at protecting forest in a National Park in
Bali. The project will do nothing to address the drivers of deforestation in
Indonesia and less to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel.
Robin Biddulph, a
researcher at the Department of Human Geography at the University of Gothenburg
in Sweden, describes such projects as “Geographies of Evasion”.
He explains the concept as “implementing
interventions in places where they do not make a difference”.
Comments [I have edited
these comments to only include the most basic language about the common sense
(or lack thereof) of conducting a deforestation measurement project in a
national park with little deforestation.
Both commenters are well-versed in the carbon-credit/biomass removal
language, but it is pretty mind-bending so I eliminated it.]
Comment 1 We applaud the author’s concerns that any
REDD or REDD-like project demonstrate real and verifiable reductions in carbon
emissions. . . . .
Unfortunately, the author is incorrect in asserting that The RFS precludes government
gazetted Protected Areas because they do not pass a three-level additionality
test. The RFS explicitly states the following:
“ER1: The RFS™ endorses
the strict Legal Additionality Test, but allows one exception under very
limited circumstances: i.e. where
there is a history of recent and repeated Tree Biomass removals inside a
Protected Area.
Limiting evidence of removals to those that have
occurred inside a Protected Area eliminates consideration of threats from external Drivers of
Deforestation such as highway construction or expanding farming and ranching
activity. In the view of The RFS™, outside threats should not be
considered because the law has already recognized those threats when
prohibiting removals inside the Protected Area. In other words, external
threats to a Protected Area cannot trigger a finding of Additionality; instead there must be evidence that the
Protected Area is experiencing recent and repeated Tree Biomass removals
despite its legal protection, i.e., there is clear evidence of ineffective
enforcement in the Protected Area. The RFS™ recognizes that there may
also be examples of ineffective enforcement of laws against removing Tree
Biomass outside of Protected Areas; however, the extent to which any Project Proponent is complicit or
compliant with respect to illegal removals is presently deemed too difficult to
determine. The RFS™ makes the presumption that the Governmental
Authority managing a Protected Area would not be so complicit or compliant.
Therefore, The RFS™ retains strict legal Additionality for all Project Areas
other than Protected Areas[1].
[1] Reduced Removals in Protected Areas will be
able to earn a special form of RFS Credit™ to be known as RFS Protected Area
Credits™. Important
features of RFS Protected Area Credits™ include: (a) proceeds from their sale
must be used solely for the social, environmental, and economic well-being of
the Protected Area and its Rightsholders; (b) the credits cannot be
resold or transferred by the initial purchaser, and therefore will not be
subject to market price fluctuations or speculation; and (c) credit purchase
agreements will be long-term and performance-based. RFS Protected Area Credits™ will be used to
financially support management of Protected Areas to reduce their deforestation
and degradation consistent with the integrated social, environmental, and
economic well-being practices required by The Rainforest Standard. . . .
Based on on-the-ground experience of
this group of nearly 70 practitioners [who created the Rainforest Standards], a
conservative method was developed to include Protected Areas. Why? Because in all but a very few
countries, Protected Areas are not protected. The principal reason for
the lack of protection is a lack of funding to underwrite a Best Practices
Management Plan that includes all stakeholders in the protection of the
Protected Area.
Comment 2 [to previous
commenter]:.1. Deforestation in West Bali National Park is low compared to
many other areas of Indonesia (whether or not they are inside national
parks).
2. Determining how much carbon is saved from entering the atmosphere as
a result of a REDD project is fiendishly complicated. It’s difficult to measure
the carbon accurately and it’s even more difficult to guess what would have
happened in the absence of the project. Having said that, it’s even more difficult to stop
deforestation in areas of current rapid deforestation such as Sumatra or
Kalimantan or where the threat of deforestation is high . . . . If the aim is to reduce deforestation in Indonesia, why
is stopping deforestation in the West Bali National Park a priority?
3.
If the aim is to stop deforestation in national parks in Indonesia, why start in a national park
with very little deforestation?
4. How much money has the University of
Columbia received from USAID for the Rainforest Standard project in total?
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