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Dusun Guhanaga is a village in Aceh in an area called Gunung Hujan (Rain Mountain). The road to the village is an ex-logging road built by PT Aceh Inti Timber. When the company was awarded the HPH (Hak Pengusahaan Hutan) Forest Concession, it immediately started logging the forest outside the concession area.
In January 2013, chairman of the Aceh parliament’s spatial planning committee, told Australian journalist Michael Bachelard that a proposed new spatial plan for Aceh would reduce the total forest cover in the province from about 68% to 45%. And this week Greenomics Indonesia published a report criticising the Governor of Aceh’s plans to allow logging in 54,593 hectares of protected forest.
In 2006, an evaluation of Norwegian aid to Tanzania revealed that about US$30 million had been lost to corruption and mismanagement in the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism. The money was about half of the total that Norway spent on a Management of Natural Resources Programme. This week, Norwegian aid is in the headlines again over allegations of corruption in Tanzania.
The debate about the World Bank’s lending on forests is heating up after the Independent Evaluation Group’s review was leaked last week. The IEG report is very critical of the World Bank’s record in the forestry sector, particularly the fact that the Bank’s involvement in forests has failed to address poverty and has not benefited local communities.
Yesterday in Jakarta, a coalition of NGOs held a press conference to demand that the Indonesian government takes meaningful action to protect Indonesia’s remaining forests. Among their demands is that the two-year moratorium on new forest concessions should be extended beyond May 2013.
Indonesia is the world’s largest exporter of coal for power stations. The government is planning new infrastructure, including a US$2.8 billion railway, to help increase exports even further. How does this fit with the same government’s promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Obviously, it doesn’t.
The Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park covers an area of 356,800 hectares in the south of Sumatra, Indonesia. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is home to tigers, elephants and Sumatran rhinos. But recent research found that more than 100,000 people are farming inside the National Park.
Cambodia’s forests face huge threats from illegal logging, mining and land concessions for plantation crops for export like rubber and sugar. Oddar Meanchey province in the country’s northwest has the highest rate of deforestation of any province in the country. Which should make Oddar Meanchey the perfect place for a REDD project.
In May 2010, Indonesia’s President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, signed a Letter of Intent with Norway for a US$1 billion REDD deal. In December 2010, Yudhoyono announced that Central Kalimantan would be a pilot province under the deal. This means that Central Kalimantan’s remaining forests are protected, right? Wrong.
On its website, the German Environmental Ministry’s International Climate Initiative has an image of a smiling blonde girl holding a globe. It all looks so simple and clean. But the reality at Harapan Rainforest Project, one of the projects funded by the International Climate Initiative is neither simple nor clean.
In November 2012, Indonesia’s Minister of Forestry, Zulkifli Hasan, visited the Harapan Rainforest Project in Jambi Province, Sumatra. “The squatters must be removed from the forest and moved to another place,” he said. “Do not allow the recovery programme of the last lowland forest in Sumatra to fail.”
World Rainforest Movement has produced a booklet aimed at informing communities about the “serious problems that a REDD project can cause for the people involved”.
For REDD to work we need to address climate change, otherwise the forests will go up in smoke. To address climate change we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground. So why isn’t this on the UNFCCC agenda in Doha? Doublethink: Norway’s Pension Fund to stop investing oil profits in climate change and deforestation
Norway is by far the biggest donor to REDD initiatives around the world, with two billion dollar deals, one in Brazil and one in Indonesia. But Norway’s Pension Fund invests way more in companies responsible for rainforest destruction.
“You can find almost everything in Indonesia,” said President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono at the first Indonesia Investment Day in New York last month. “Oil and gas, coal, geothermal energy, tin, copper, nickel, aluminum, bauxite, iron, cacao, coffee. When it comes to oil, we have oil underground, under the sea and even above the ground: palm oil.” |
    
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 Content written by Chris Lang / REDD-Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
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