UN forest program hits political snags

A United Nations program to curb deforestation and carbon emissions in Indonesia has improved forest management, but is being hampered by a "political economy based on forest destruction", a New Zealand researcher said on Wednesday.

Dr Andrew McGregor of Victoria University worked with a team examining the impact and complications of the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation program, developed through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and voluntary carbon markets.

More than 50 countries were piloting the program around the world. Some, including Indonesia which has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world, actively generated carbon credits for voluntary markets.

"When it was first conceived it was thought to be a quick and cheap way to mitigate climate change, but this research shows mitigation is difficult, uncertain and expensive," McGregor said.

The key difficulty in Indonesia came from an existing political economy based on forest destruction.

"For example, the payments businesses get for not cutting down trees don't match the payments they could get for selling oil palms. There are very powerful players who will lose out if they move to a REDD+ system, and this has slowed program implementation," he said.

Some indigenous groups living in their traditional areas have received greater recognition of their rights and support for their customary claims to forest and land, while communities that had migrated from other places in Indonesia might not have received the same opportunities.

"Even at the community scale we observed exclusions where existing power structures restricted who could access the benefits from some of these projects. The whole idea of equal benefit sharing, while laudable, is very fraught and difficult to achieve," McGregor said.

Among the positive outcomes of the program in Indonesia were increased transparency, enhanced recognition of indigenous land rights, a national freeze on new logging licenses and greater awareness of forest conservation.

"Forests are now more center stage, across the nation people are more aware of forest destruction taking place, and a number of initiatives have been implemented to prevent deforestation," McGregor said.