An oil palm seedling in a burned peat forest. Credit: Courtesy of Wetland International

By Zhai Yun Tan
WASHINGTON, Aug 6 2015 (IPS)

Following growing concerns in the United States about the risks of trans fat since 1999, demand for palm oil, a cheap substitute for trans fat, more than doubled over the last decade and is expected to increase, eliciting concerns about deforestation in several Southeast Asian countries that provide 85 percent of the world’s palm oil.

Trans fat is a partially hydrogenated oil added to many frozen and baked goods that improves shelf life and adds flavour. The United States’ Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed banning trans fat after studies showed it may cause cardiovascular diseases. FDA banned the use of trans fat last month.

The ban, along with the burgeoning demand by China and India, are among the reasons many experts say motivate the rise in demand for palm oil. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, global demand for palm oil is likely to grow by 60 percent in 2050 from 1999. Palm oil imports in the United States increased by more than 80 percent since 1999, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

“Palm oil has a lot of same properties that hydrogenated oil has, that’s one of the reasons why it’s a common replacement,” Lael Goodman, a tropical forest analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists told IPS in an interview. “As companies are looking around on what to use instead of these partially hydrogenated oils, palm oil is the cheapest vegetable oil in the market now.”

Palm oil plantations, according to the United Nations Environment Programme and Greenpeace International, is the leading cause of deforestation in Indonesia and Malaysia. Although United States imports most of its palm oil from Malaysia, Malaysia’s production growth is slowed by limited land and labor, according to USDA. Indonesia has emerged as the largest exporter since 2011.

Source: World Resources Institute

The concerns come at a time when Indonesia is expecting to double its palm oil production by 2020 in response to the rise in demand, although it is already suffering from one of the world’s highest deforestation rates.

Joko Widodo, president of Indonesia, strengthened the country’s moratorium against deforestation earlier this year. However, the moratorium, which was introduced in 2011, has failed to control the expansion of oil palm plantations in primary forest and peat lands, according to USDA.

A study by researchers from University of Maryland and World Resources Institute (WRI), a Washington, D.C. based think tank, revealed that Indonesia lost over 6 million hectares of primary forest from 2000 to 2012, an area half the size of England.

“We don’t have the data for 2014 or 2015 yet and there was a decrease in 2013, but the end result is still that the deforestation rate is at one of the highest rate it’s been in the country’s history,” James Anderson, communications manager for WRI’s Forests Program, told IPS.

The country is also notorious for causing haze pollution in Southeast Asia for forest burning activities that are often linked to land clearing for palm oil plantations.

“Up to 20 percent of land that are on fire have been traced back to palm oil,” Goodman said. “When peat soils are cleared– these are very carbon-rich soils– they can burn for months or even years. It puts a lot of particulate matter into the air that spreads across Asia and it is a huge health issue every year.”

The fires usually peak around September every year. In 2013, Malaysia and Singapore were badly hit by the haze pollution. The Singapore Meteorological Service expects haze pollution from Indonesia to be as bad this year with the incoming El Nino season.

Goodman said companies, under pressure from the public, have begun to focus on deforestation-free palm oil.

“There is a very great corporate attention to where palm oil comes from,” she said. “A lot of those pledges started in 2015, some of them don’t start until 2020. We are really just starting to see what’s going to make a difference hopefully in the next few years.”

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was established in 2004 as a certification body for the production of sustainable palm oil. The nonprofit’s website said that it has over 2,000 members, representing 40 percent of the palm oil industry, and it certifies 20 percent of the world’s palm oil production.

Several companies, such as Dunkin’ Brands, Krispy Kreme, McDonald’s have made commitments to purchase deforestation-free palm oil in recent years.

Global Forest Watch (GFW), an initiative convened by WRI, tracks forest fires and forest clearings in Indonesia. The service offers real time maps of deforestation and hotspots for users. According to WRI, companies using the system include Unilever and members of the RSPO.

“A lot of companies lack the tools to actually implement the commitments simply because it is very difficult to trace their supply chains to know if the palm oil is coming from a place that is actually deforested,” Sarah Lake, corporate engagement research analyst for GFW told IPS.

The GFW service, she said, was offered free-of-charge to companies to receive alerts and monitor their land for deforestation or fires.

“Our approach isn’t necessarily to reduce the use of palm oil,” Lake said. “It can be perfectly sustainable. It’s just a matter of making sure you’re sourcing palm oil that isn’t linked to environmentally problematic behaviour.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Maridiana Deren, an environmental activist based in Kalimantan, Indonesia, says that palm oil companies are destroying indigenous peoples’ ancient way of life. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
BALI, Indonesia, Mar 16 2015 (IPS)

Over the past three decades, 50 percent of the 544,150 square kilometres that comprise Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo, has been taken over by the palm oil industry.

“It will expand until it pushes us all into the ocean,” prophesies Mina Setra, deputy secretary-general of the Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN), who has fought for years to preserve an ancient way of life from being bulldozed to make way for mono-crop plantations.

“The people who have lived off the land for generations become criminals because they want to preserve their way of life." -- Mina Setra, deputy secretary-general of the Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN)
For her, the business of producing the oil, a favourite of consumers around the world, needs to fall in line with the principles of sustainability. On its current growth spurt, the industry threatens to undermine local economies, indigenous communities and Indonesia’s delicate network of biodiversity.

Consumption of palm oil has risen steadily at seven percent per annum over the last 20 years, according to new data from a report published by the Dublin-based consultancy Research and Markets.

Globally, more people consume palm oil than soybean oil, and Indonesia is the largest producer of the stuff, churning out 31 million tonnes of palm oil in 2014. Malaysia and Indonesia together account for 85 percent of palm oil produced globally each year.

While output is predicted to be lower in 2015, the industry continues to expand rapidly, swallowing up millions of hectares of forestland to make space for palm plantations.

Indonesian government officials and industrialists insist that the sector boosts employment, and benefits local communities, but people like Setra disagree, arguing instead that the highly unsustainable business model is wreaking havoc on the environment and indigenous people, who number between 50 and 70 million in a country with a population of 249 million.

Busting the myth of equality and employment

A recent study by the Washington-based Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) found that the main benefactors of the palm oil industry are the big investors and companies that control 80 percent of the global palm oil trade.

The report found, “[The] palm oil sector has added little real value to the Indonesian economy. The average contribution of estate crops, including oil palm and rubber, to GDP [gross domestic product] was only 2.2 percent per year […].”

On the other hand, “food production is the main source of rural employment and income, engaging two-thirds of the rural workforce, or some 61 million people. Oil palm production only occupies the eighth rank in rural employment, engaging some 1.4 million people.”

About half of those engaged in palm oil production are smallholders, earning higher wages than their counterparts employed by palm oil companies (about 75 dollars a month compared to 57 dollars a month).

According to the World Wildlife Fund in the last three-and-a-half decades Indonesia and Malaysia lost a combination of 3.5 million hectares of forest to palm oil plantations. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

The industry witnessed a 15-percent drop in profits last year, but this year profits are expected to rise, with prices settling between 500 and 600 dollars per tonne. Still, many producers in Indonesia and Malaysia openly advocate lower wages to keep profit levels high.

Experts also believe the sector does a poor job of redirecting profits into the communities because of a model that relies on eating up land and falling back on a system of patronage.

“This patronage system serves as the basic structure for the production, marketing, and distribution of palm oil. It connects significant actors in order to facilitate their businesses through legitimate mechanisms such as palm oil consortia, which usually consist of local strongmen, senior bureaucrats, and influential businessmen with close links to top national leaders,” the RRI report concluded.

Grassroots activists like Setra say that industrialists are also skilled at manipulating legal loopholes to continue expanding their plantations.

For instance, the Indonesian government has imposed a moratorium on land clearing for new plantations, a bid to appease scientists, Western nations and citizens concerned about the gobbling up of rainforests for monocultures.

However, the ban only applies to new licenses, not existing ones, allowing companies with longstanding licenses to violate the law without question.

Even when the central government cracks down, activists say, companies use local connections with powerful politicians to undercut regulations.

“It is a vicious system that feeds on itself,” the indigenous activist tells IPS.

Unjust, unsustainable

According to Bryson Ogden, RRI’s private sector analyst, “The structure of the industry is such that it leaves out local communities.”

“The biggest losers in this process were locals who lost their lands and livelihoods but have not been incorporated in the new economy on advantageous terms,” the RRI report said. “Indigenous peoples, subsistence farmers, and women were the most vulnerable groups, as well as smallholders owning and managing their own oil palm plots.”

But when locals try to take a stand for their rights, such campaigns result in the alienation of whole communities or, worse, the criminalisation of their activities.

In July 2014, a protestor was shot dead by police in south Kalimantan while taking part in a protest against palm oil expansion. Another such killing was reported on Feb. 28 in Jambi, located on the east coast of the island of Sumatra.

“The people who have lived off the land for generations become criminals because they want to preserve their way of life,” Setra laments.

She believes that as long as there is global demand for the oil without an accompanying international campaign to highlight the product’s impact on local people, companies are unlikely to change their mode of operation.

Others say the problem is a lack of data. Scott Poynton, founder of The Forest Trust (TFT), an international environmental NGO, tells IPS that there is inadequate information on the socio-economic impacts of oil operations.

He says the focus on deforestation – in Indonesia and elsewhere – is a result of the tireless work of NGOs dedicated to the issue, combined with “easy-to-use tools like the World Resource Institute’s Global Forest Watch”, a mapping system that allow people to quickly and cheaply identify deforestation.

He says similar resources must be made available to those like Setra – grassroots leaders on the ground, who are able to monitor and report on social degradation caused by the palm oil sector.

As the United Nations and its member states move closer to finalising the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – the international community’s blueprint for development and poverty-reduction in the coming decades – Indonesia and the palm oil sector will be forced to reckon with the unsustainable nature of the mono-crop corporate model, and move towards a practice of inclusivity.

One of the primary topics informing the knowledge platform on the SDGs is the promise of Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP), defined as “the use of services and related products, which respond to basic needs and bring a better quality of life while minimizing the use of natural resources […] so as not to jeopardize the needs of further generations.”

According to the World Wildlife Fund in the last three-and-a-half decades Indonesia and Malaysia lost a combination of 3.5 million hectares of forest to palm oil plantations.

Statistics like these suggest that nothing short of sweeping changes will be required to put indigenous people like Setra at the centre of the debate, and build a sustainable future for palm oil production.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Indonesian President Joko Widodo (right) and Walhi Executive Director Abetnego Tarigan (centre) come to Sungai Tohor village. Credit: Walhi/Friends of the Earth Indonesia

By Jeff Conant
JAKARTA, Dec 5 2014 (IPS)

Last week, Indonesia’s new president, Joko Widodo, ordered the country’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry to review the licenses of all companies that have converted peatlands to oil palm plantations.

If the ministry follows through, this will be one of the most important actions the Indonesian government can take to begin truly reining in the destruction reaped by the palm oil industry there – and to address the severe climate impacts of peatland destruction.“The best thing to do is to give the land to people... They won’t do any harm to nature. However, if we give the land to corporations, they will only switch it to monoculture plantations.” -- President Widodo

The Indonesian Forum on the Environment, known as WALHI/Friends of the Earth Indonesia, has been pushing for this initiative, and the announcement was made in the village of River Tohor, in Riau Province, where WALHI has long worked with the community.

Walhi had invited Jokowi, as the president is casually known, to come to Riau because the province is ground zero for Indonesia’s massive haze crisis that comes from the near-constant burning of carbon-rich peatlands in order to convert these fragile ecosystems to plantations.

“We invited him to River Tohor to demonstrate the community’s success in preserving the peat forest ecosystem,” said Zenzi Suhadi, forest campaigner for Walhi.

“We hoped this visit would show the president that community management can protect forests, and that granting concessions to companies is the wrong approach,” Suhadi said.

The strategy appears to have succeeded, as Walhi hailed President Jokowi’s Riau visit as proof of his commitment to solving ecological problems.

“The best thing to do is to give the land to people,” the president told the Jakarta Globe. “What’s made by people is usually environmentally friendly. They won’t do any harm to nature. However, if we give the land to corporations, they will only switch it to monoculture plantations.”

“I have told the minister of environment and forestry to review the licenses of companies that have converted peatlands into monoculture plantations if they are found damaging the ecosystem,” Jokowi said. “There is no other solution to the issue; everyone understands what must be done.” 

Peatlands – waterlogged vegetable soils that make up a significant portion of Indonesia’s rainforests – are great storehouses of carbon dioxide. The widespread practice of draining and burning peat to develop palm-oil and other plantation crops makes Indonesia the world’s third largest emitter of global warming pollution, after China and the United States.

Taking strong measures to prevent this practice may be the single best action Indonesia can take in the fight to curb the climate crisis.

Palm oil producers have fought long to preserve the ability to clear peatlands. When Wilmar International, among the world’s largest palm oil traders, announced last year that it would stop trading palm oil grown on cleared peatlands, some suppliers pushed back, saying it would not only harm the industry, but would set back the economic development of smallholder farmers.

Jokowi appears to have taken the economic argument to heart: he made the announcement to audit palm oil concession licenses after joining the local community to plant seedlings of sago, a native palm species that is harvested for its starchy tapioca-like pith, a food product that can be sold locally or for export.

“The president’s decision to audit concession licenses to protect peat puts the interests of citizens ahead of the interests of the industry,” said Suhadi.

“This is an acknowledgment that the people of Indonesia have been waiting on for decades,” Suhadi continued. “Finally it is recognized that government must foster trust in people to be the first to protect forests.”

Jokowi’s move came shortly after his government announced a four- to six-month moratorium on all new logging concessions. That prohibition goes beyond the 2011 nationwide moratorium on new concessions across more than 14 million hectares of forests and peatlands

The move also comes on the heels of Jokowi’s announcement that the Ministry of Forests and the Ministry of Environment would be combined into one ministry, headed by Siti Nurbaya – a move that not all see as positive but that does signal a radical effort to restructure the way the government manages lands and resources.

Jokowi has also pledged to clean up Indonesia’s notoriously corrupt forestry sector as a step toward reducing deforestation.

Walhi Executive Director Abetnego Tarigan says the president must soon follow up the visit with “concrete actions” in the form of firm law enforcement.

“Among the concrete actions that President Jokowi can immediately take is ordering the termination concessions for companies proven to have been involved in forest and land fires,” Abetnego said.

“Law enforcement must continue legal action against companies that have been named suspects, as well as develop investigations into companies that civilians have filed reports against,” he added.

The environmental and social degradation caused by the palm oil is founded upon corruption and illegality, Walhi argues.

“In order to begin restoring forests and returning rights to the people,” says Suhadi, “the large companies need to be the first target of the government. President Jokowi needs to streamline the ability of law enforcement to take action against these companies as part of a national movement to reclaim citizen’s rights to lands and livelihoods.

“As it is now, law enforcement agencies are part of the corporate crime wave that undermines peoples’ rights. The first duty of the government is to improve law enforcement in the forest sector.”

It appears that, after decades of growing corruption and the massive deforestation, climate pollution and social conflict that has followed from it, Indonesia’s new president may be serious about bringing much-needed change.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

For the second time this year, an internal auditor has criticised the World Bank’s private sector investment agency over dealings in Honduras, and is warning that similar problems are likely being experienced elsewhere.

The investigation found that the bank’s private sector investment agency, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), took on a significant stake in a Honduran bank but undertook “insufficient measures” to assess that institution’s own investments. These included at least one company involved in a deadly land dispute.“The philosophy of the World Bank is to ‘end poverty’, but what has happened in this process has been the opposite.” -- La Plataforma Agraria de Honduras

The auditor, known as the Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman (CAO), also levels a broader critique of the IFC’s investments in third-party groups such as the Honduran bank. When dealing with these “financial intermediaries”, the CAO warns, financial considerations appear to be receiving far more attention from officials than the environmental and social policies meant to safeguard local communities.

“IFC acquired an equity stake in a commercial bank with significant exposure to high risk sectors and clients, but which lacked capacity to implement IFC’s environmental and social requirements,” the CAO states in a report released Monday.

“The absence of an environmental and social review process that was commensurate to risk meant that key decision makers … were not presented with an adequate assessment of the risks that were attached to this investment.”

The report focuses on a 2011 IFC investment, worth 70 million dollars, in Banco Ficohsa, Honduras’s third-largest bank. CAO found that important information was withheld between IFC offices over the extent of business between Banco Ficohsa and Corporacion Dinant, an agribusiness company that for years has been accused of waging a violent campaign to expand its palm oil plantations in the country’s Aguan Valley.

In January, CAO issued critical findings on a separate IFC investment in Dinant, from 2009, worth 30 million dollars. Dinant is owned by Miguel Facusse Barjum, one of the wealthiest businessmen in the country and reportedly a backer of the 2009 military coup that ousted a pro-reform president.

Over the past half-decade, more than 100 people have reportedly been killed in the Aguan Valley in clashes between Dinant security personnel and local cooperatives.

IFC has put on hold the Dinant deal and enacted a plan aimed at ameliorating the situation. The new report does not find evidence that the Banco Ficohsa deal was aimed at funnelling additional funds to Dinant, but CAO researchers suggest that the effect was the same.

“[W]aiving a key financial covenant and then taking an equity position in Ficohsa … facilitated a significant ongoing flow of capital to Dinant, outside the framework of its environmental and social standards,” the report states.

Local civil society groups say the effect has been devastating.

“The philosophy of the World Bank is to ‘end poverty’, but what has happened in this process has been the opposite,” La Plataforma Agraria de Honduras, a Honduran network, told IPS in Spanish.

“Instead, we’ve seen greater wealth for corporations and transnational landowners and greater poverty for the poor, who have been driven from their lands. And although the previous CAO report was very critical, the World Bank has continued to finance Dinant through Ficohsa.”

Beneath the intermediaries

In a formal response also released Monday, the IFC does not dispute the CAO findings. But it does suggest that they are no longer relevant, following changes put in place in part in response to the January CAO report on Dinant.

New procedures, for instance, will now allow for additional oversight visits to “medium risk clients”. Multiple new processes will also aim to close information gaps of the type that led to the Ficohsa revelations, including the creation of a new vice-president-level position to focus on “risk and sustainability”.

“Under this new structure, [environmental and social] risk will receive the same weight and attention as financial and reputation risk,” two IFC vice-presidents wrote in a letter to CAO.

Yet the remarkably critical CAO report has already added momentum to an ongoing campaign to convince the World Bank Group to reform the IFC’s dealings with financial intermediaries such as Banco Ficohsa. Such deals have become increasingly important to the IFC’s portfolio over the past decade, but they have traditionally offered far less oversight for the agency.

In such projects, the IFC requires the intermediary to set up a system aimed at ensuring that stringent environmental and social safeguards are met. But analysis of the effects of this system on the ground is left to the intermediary.

“This issue has been questioned in many cases – where a financial intermediary is the one doing the disbursements and the IFC is completely separate and doesn’t know what’s going on,” Carla Garcia Zendejas, a programme director at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), a Washington-based watchdog group, told IPS.

“That’s the case here. Even if you have a system in place to assess these risks, if you’re not doing that properly the whole system is worthless.”

Systemic reassessment

The CAO has repeatedly questioned the IFC’s policies on investments in financial intermediaries (a broad investigation can be found here). This time, the investigators are clear that the Honduras situation is likely not an isolated incident.

“[T]he shortcomings identified in this investigation … are indicative of a system of support to [financial intermediaries] which does not support IFC’s higher level environmental and social commitments,” CAO states.

“CAO’s findings raise concerns that IFC has, through its banking investments, an unanalyzed and unquantified exposure to projects with potential significant adverse environmental and social impacts.”

The auditor warns that, under current disclosure mechanisms, “this exposure is also effectively secret”, and calls for a “reassessment” of the agency’s management of social and environmental risk in its dealings with financial institutions.

Rights advocates note that similar concerns are cropping up in IFC investments in financial intermediaries elsewhere.

“One of this report’s main findings is that there is a breakdown in the IFC’s systems approach to [financial intermediaries], especially in risk categorization,” Jelson Garcia, of the Bank Information Center (BIC), a watchdog group here, told IPS in an e-mailed statement. “This … links to recent cases in Myanmar and India as yet another example of the IFC needing to take stringent and urgent reforms of its financial markets lending approach.”

Advocacy groups say a primary concern is the IFC’s institutional culture, which they say prioritises the volume of loans disbursed over their quality. BIC, CIEL and others are now calling on World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim to order the preparation of a reform plan in time for the next big World Bank Group meetings, in October.

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

Logs stacked in Riau, Sumatra, which has one of Indonesia’s highest rates of deforestation. Credit: Sandra Siagian/IPS

By Sandra Siagian
JAKARTA, May 27 2014 (IPS)

Comprised of over 17,000 islands that are highly susceptible to rising seas, Indonesia is taking stock of its position as the world’s third leading emitter of greenhouse gases after the United States and China.

Faced with the upcoming GLOBE Summit of World Legislators, scheduled to take place in Mexico City next month to test a new international climate change agreement centered on national legislation, the Indonesian government is in a race against time to evaluate its existing climate change policies, and bring its laws in line with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s promise to slash carbon emissions by 26 percent by 2020.

The international community is largely agreed that the next two years will be crucial in determining the planet’s future vis-à-vis global warming. At the end of 2015, Paris will host the 21^st session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an event scientists are calling the “last chance” for world leaders to agree on a global emissions peak.

"What we need [now] is to encourage frank and open dialogue between legislators and the government.” -- Farhan Helmy, manager of the Indonesia Climate Change Center (ICCC)
Indonesia is poised to play a significant role in negotiations, with local initiatives like its Green Economy Caucus (GEC) – a sustainable development model launched last year – offering valuable lessons for the international community.

But environmental experts here say that unless swift steps are taken to boost dialogue between legislators and government officials, the country will not advance far down its path towards sustainability.

Farhan Helmy, manager of the Indonesia Climate Change Centre (ICCC), is hopeful that the GLOBE summit will provide the basis for exactly this kind of conversation.

“The conversations so far [on climate change] have not been very well connected, even in Warsaw last year,” Helmy, who was a lead negotiator with the Indonesian delegation on climate change at the 2013 UNFCCC in Poland, told IPS.

“I don’t think we need to reinvent the wheel with less than two years left… What we do need is to encourage frank and open dialogue between the legislators and the government.”

Helmy strongly supports platforms like the GEC, comprised of a team of lawmakers who are plotting the country’s transition to a green economy, including identifying environmentally friendly methods of exploiting natural resources.

According to Satya Yudha, GEC’s president and a member of Indonesia’s House of Representatives who was recently re-elected for another five-year term in office, the caucus also focuses on devising green bills, creating a renewable energy strategy, and implementing the United Nations-backed REDD+ initiative (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation).

The latter, Yudha told IPS, is essential for the management of land usage and for monitoring forest conservation and protected areas.

“Seventy percent of [Indonesia’s] carbon emissions come from land usage, and 30 percent from the energy sector,” he said, adding that legislators must push parliamentarians to prioritise environmental policies when setting the government’s annual budget.

Setyo Budiantoro from Prakarsa – the local NGO that helped set up the GEC – told IPS that one of Indonesia’s biggest obstacles was its parliamentarians’ mistrust in the very notion of climate change.

“That’s why there’s no…sense of urgency for parliamentarians to act on a climate change law,” the NGO’s executive director explained. “So that’s one of GEC’s main objectives, to create more awareness.”

The case for a multi-sector approach

Indonesia’s attempts to cut emissions caused by deforestation also serve as an excellent case study on the need for collaboration between lawmakers and various government sectors.

Deforestation has been rampant here in recent years, mainly due to the world’s hunger for palm oil, pulp and paper. According to a 2013 study published in ‘Science’ magazine, the country’s rate of deforestation between 2000 and 2003 totalled roughly one million hectares a year, and doubled to two million hectares a year between 2011 and 2012.

The destruction has led to deadly flash floods, landslides and the loss of habitat for endangered species like orangutans and rhinos.

Last year Yudhoyono extended a 2011 moratorium, which barred new logging and palm-oil plantation permits under a one-billion-dollar deal with Norway.

The extension of the landmark ban on clearing primary rainforests and peat lands will preserve 64 million hectares until 2015. However, environmentalists have been sceptical that some protected areas continue to be exploited due to corruption, illegal fires and logging.

A recent Human Rights Watch report argued that Indonesia’s forestry ministry failed to “accurately map forests, land use, and concession boundaries, and did not fairly allocate use rights.”

Citing an investigation by the country’s Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), the report, entitled ‘The Dark Side of Green Growth’, found that these “weaknesses were central causes of persistent corruption and lost government revenue, as well as high levels of deforestation.”

Muhammad Farid from REDD+ believes that Indonesia “needs to enforce policies from the top level to monitor all land sectors for unplanned deforestation, illegal logging, encroachment and forest fires.”

“REDD+ can’t fix everything,” he told IPS. “We need support from other ministries within Indonesia to really make a difference. Mining, agriculture, home affairs, they all need to coordinate with the government. This is not an easy task, but it will eventually be done.”

Locally, the jury is still out on Yudhoyono’s voluntary pledge to severely reduce carbon emissions by the end of the decade. Some experts, like Yudha, admit the president is on the right path, but are concerned about balancing an “ambitious” target with savvy economic policies.

Others, like Farid, are more optimistic, convinced that the right policies and incentives could put the country within reach of the goal in six years.

“If we [successfully] reduce encroachment and [improve] the state of our forests, and also…reduce unplanned deforestation and illegal logging, I think this goal can be reached,” he said.

With presidential elections scheduled for July, it remains to be seen whether or not the new government will follow in Yudhoyono’s footsteps.

“My hope is that whoever leads the country understands that we are not alone in [these] efforts,” Helmy asserted, adding that Indonesia is just one of many countries actively participating in global negotiations on climate change.

“I think the stakes for us are quite high… we have small islands and rising sea levels.”

Given that reality, if Indonesia fails to take concrete steps to strengthen its national legislation it will stop being part of the solution and join the ranks of the “troublemakers in the global society,” he added.