Indonesia has criticised the terms of a global deal to end deforestation by 2030, signalling that the country may not abide by it.
Logging in forest in Nisam Antara, Indonesia's Aceh province, October 2021.
Photo: AFP
Environment Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar said the authorities could not "promise what we can't do".
She said forcing Indonesia to commit to zero deforestation by 2030 was "clearly inappropriate and unfair".
Despite President Joko Widodo signing the forest deal, she said development remained Indonesia's top priority.
The deal, agreed between more than 100 world leaders, was announced on Monday at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. It was the event's first major announcement.
It promises to end and reverse deforestation by 2030, and includes about $US19 billion of public and private funds.
In a Facebook post Nurbaya argued that the country's vast natural resources must be used for the benefit of its people.
She cited the need to to cut down forests to make way for new roads.
"The massive development of President Jokowi's era must not stop in the name of carbon emissions or in the name of deforestation," she said, referring to Widodo by his nickname.
"Indonesia's natural wealth, including forests, must be managed for its use according to sustainable principles, besides being fair," she said.
A barge carrying logs is pulled along the Mahakam River, in East Kalimantan, 4 November 2021. Photo: AFP
Experts welcomed the agreement, but they warned a previous deal in 2014 had "failed to slow deforestation at all" and said commitments needed to be delivered on.
Felling trees contributes to climate change because it depletes forests that absorb vast amounts of the warming gas CO2.
Meanwhile, Indonesia's Deputy Foreign Minister Mahendra Siregar said that describing the deal as a zero-deforestation pledge was "false and misleading".
Indonesia's vast forests are still shrinking, despite a marked slow down in the deforestation rate in recent years.
According to the Global Forest Watch monitoring website, in 2001 the country had nearly 94 million hectares of primary forest - defined as tropical forest that has not been completely cleared and regrown in recent history.
That area had decreased by at least 10 percent by 2020.
- BBC
Environment Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar said the authorities could not "promise what we can't do".
She said forcing Indonesia to commit to zero deforestation by 2030 was "clearly inappropriate and unfair".
Despite President Joko Widodo signing the forest deal, she said development remained Indonesia's top priority.
The deal, agreed between more than 100 world leaders, was announced on Monday at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. It was the event's first major announcement.
It promises to end and reverse deforestation by 2030, and includes about $US19 billion of public and private funds.
In a Facebook post Nurbaya argued that the country's vast natural resources must be used for the benefit of its people.
She cited the need to to cut down forests to make way for new roads.
"The massive development of President Jokowi's era must not stop in the name of carbon emissions or in the name of deforestation," she said, referring to Widodo by his nickname.
"Indonesia's natural wealth, including forests, must be managed for its use according to sustainable principles, besides being fair," she said.
A barge carrying logs is pulled along the Mahakam River, in East Kalimantan, 4 November 2021. Photo: AFP
Experts welcomed the agreement, but they warned a previous deal in 2014 had "failed to slow deforestation at all" and said commitments needed to be delivered on.
Felling trees contributes to climate change because it depletes forests that absorb vast amounts of the warming gas CO2.
Meanwhile, Indonesia's Deputy Foreign Minister Mahendra Siregar said that describing the deal as a zero-deforestation pledge was "false and misleading".
Indonesia's vast forests are still shrinking, despite a marked slow down in the deforestation rate in recent years.
According to the Global Forest Watch monitoring website, in 2001 the country had nearly 94 million hectares of primary forest - defined as tropical forest that has not been completely cleared and regrown in recent history.
That area had decreased by at least 10 percent by 2020.
- BBC
The world has pledged to stop deforestation before. But trees are still disappearing at an 'untenable rate.'
A felled tree is seen in the middle of a deforested area of the Yari plains, in Caqueta, Colombia March 3, 2021. Picture taken March 3, 2021. REUTERS/Luisa Gonzalez
Tik Root and Harry Stevens, (c) 2021, The Washington Post
Wed, November 3, 2021
On Tuesday, more than 100 countries signed on to an ambitious plan to halt deforestation by 2030 and pledged billions of dollars to the effort. Although world leaders lauded the move, climate activists say they've heard that promise before and that past efforts have come up short - the world is still losing massive numbers of trees each year.
"Despite ambitious political commitments to end deforestation over the past decade, we are still losing tropical primary forests at an untenable rate," said Crystal Davis, the director of the Global Forest Watch monitoring initiative. "We are running out of time to solve this problem."
According to Global Forest Watch, the world lost 411 million hectares of forest between 2001 and 2020. That's roughly half the size of the United States and equivalent to 10% of global tree cover. In 2020, the world lost a near-record 25.8 million hectares - almost double the amount in 2001.
Trees play a critical role in absorbing carbon dioxide as they grow, thereby slowing global warming. There are a number of ways trees can disappear - from logging and wildfires to being cleared to make way for crops or livestock. But when they are cut, and are either burned or decay, they release the carbon into the atmosphere. According to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, about 23% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, forestry and other land uses.
"Avoiding deforestation is the best near-term thing we could ever try to do," said Gretchen Daily, a professor at Stanford University and the co-founder of the Natural Capital Project. "That will keep more carbon out of the atmosphere and help us drive the broader transformation we need."
There have been global endeavors to combat deforestation in the past. In 2014, for instance, more than 200 governments, companies and civil society organizations signed the New York Declaration of Forests, which called for halving the rate deforestation by 2020 and halting it by 2030. But, Davis said, the world fell far short - "we blew through the 2020 targets that we set."
"It's a mixture of lack of enforcement, lack of political will and the private sector not stepping up," said Nathalie Walker, the director of tropical forest and agriculture at the National Wildlife Federation. "There has not been enough follow-through."
The Amazon is the world's largest rainforest and arguably the most closely watched harbinger of deforestation. The rainforest is 17% deforested, and losses are especially pronounced in Brazil, which lost some 1.7 million hectares of rainforest in 2020 alone.
"If you're looking at the area cleared, Brazil is usually the worst," Walker said. And of that, "cattle is the single biggest driver" of loss.
Walker notes that starting in the mid-2000s, the country saw about a decade of positive momentum on the issue. "There was a suite of public and private measures that was aiming to encourage production away from the forest frontier," she said. But in recent years, that has been reversed.
New research shows that last year, despite an economic recession, Brazil reported a 9% jump in its greenhouse gas emissions. "The principal factor," the authors wrote, "was deforestation."
South America, however, is far from the only region experiencing deforestation. Of the 10 countries that have lost the most tree cover since 2001, only two of them - Brazil and Paraguay - are Amazonian.
One of the places where Walker says trees are most at risk right now is the Democratic Republic of Congo. The country has a large amount of remaining forest but high deforestation rates due to practices such as agricultural clearing, fuelwood harvesting and logging. "The Congo is under threat," she said.
Russia is another area of concern. About half the country is covered in forests, and it has topped Global Forest Watch's list of tree-cover loss since 2001 - with some 69.5 million hectares gone. "A lot of that tends to be for timber," Walker said. While much of that may be managed timber practices, at least a portion of the logging is probably illegal, she said. And with such a large area "it's difficult to police effectively."
China is a primary consumer of Russian timber. Walker said that points to China's broader role as a purchaser of commodities linked to deforestation - whether it's Brazilian cattle hides or palm oil from Southeast Asia.
Yet the news isn't all bad.
Pakistan, for instance, is in the midst of a "Ten Billion Tree Tsunami" reforestation campaign. The project is a combination of tree planting and forest protection initiatives that have previously proved extremely successful.
In Costa Rica, the government has been paying farmers to protect forests near their farms. The project was among the five inaugural winners of Prince William's Earthshot prize, which highlights creative climate solutions and comes with a 1 million euro prize.
The efforts point to Walker's contention that "there doesn't need to be this trade-off" between economics and the environment.
Indonesia is another one of the "bright spots," Davis said. While the country is still losing forests largely to palm oil, Walker said that "they are doing much better than they were."
But addressing the problem in one place often isn't enough.
When only certain countries crack down, Walker said, the problems can just shift to places with "lower enforcement." Papa New Guinea, for instance, has also seen palm oil deforestation. And a recent investigation by the advocacy group Global Witness uncovered palm oil executives in the country disclosing corruption and brutality in secret tapes.
The global nature of deforestation-linked trade is one reason experts see this week's agreement at COP26 as important: More than 100 world leaders representing over 85% of the world's forests again pledged to halt deforestation over the next decade.
"This new set of announcements is largely a reiteration of previous commitments," Davis said. And it comes with similar risks.
Davis questions the roughly $19 billion in funding that governments and the private sector announced. "It's really just an incremental growth in the amount of finance when we need it to be exponential," she said, adding that she'll also be watching how much of the money makes it to actual projects on the ground. "It's one thing to pledge money; it's another thing to spend money."
But Davis also sees some differences this time around. More countries - particularly Brazil and China - are on board, and so is the private sector, which committed $7.2 billion of the funding. That, she said, could play an important role in helping get "deforestation out of the supply chain."
Davis said she also thinks that people - citizens - care more about this issue than in the past and can help propel political change. A recent United Nations survey of public opinion on climate change found that the most popular policy area was conserving forests and land, with over half of respondents supporting the idea.
"I have more hope for that bottom-up public pressure in this decade than the last," she said. "They are the ones that we can [apply] pressure."
A felled tree is seen in the middle of a deforested area of the Yari plains, in Caqueta, Colombia March 3, 2021. Picture taken March 3, 2021. REUTERS/Luisa Gonzalez
Tik Root and Harry Stevens, (c) 2021, The Washington Post
Wed, November 3, 2021
On Tuesday, more than 100 countries signed on to an ambitious plan to halt deforestation by 2030 and pledged billions of dollars to the effort. Although world leaders lauded the move, climate activists say they've heard that promise before and that past efforts have come up short - the world is still losing massive numbers of trees each year.
"Despite ambitious political commitments to end deforestation over the past decade, we are still losing tropical primary forests at an untenable rate," said Crystal Davis, the director of the Global Forest Watch monitoring initiative. "We are running out of time to solve this problem."
According to Global Forest Watch, the world lost 411 million hectares of forest between 2001 and 2020. That's roughly half the size of the United States and equivalent to 10% of global tree cover. In 2020, the world lost a near-record 25.8 million hectares - almost double the amount in 2001.
Trees play a critical role in absorbing carbon dioxide as they grow, thereby slowing global warming. There are a number of ways trees can disappear - from logging and wildfires to being cleared to make way for crops or livestock. But when they are cut, and are either burned or decay, they release the carbon into the atmosphere. According to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, about 23% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, forestry and other land uses.
"Avoiding deforestation is the best near-term thing we could ever try to do," said Gretchen Daily, a professor at Stanford University and the co-founder of the Natural Capital Project. "That will keep more carbon out of the atmosphere and help us drive the broader transformation we need."
There have been global endeavors to combat deforestation in the past. In 2014, for instance, more than 200 governments, companies and civil society organizations signed the New York Declaration of Forests, which called for halving the rate deforestation by 2020 and halting it by 2030. But, Davis said, the world fell far short - "we blew through the 2020 targets that we set."
"It's a mixture of lack of enforcement, lack of political will and the private sector not stepping up," said Nathalie Walker, the director of tropical forest and agriculture at the National Wildlife Federation. "There has not been enough follow-through."
The Amazon is the world's largest rainforest and arguably the most closely watched harbinger of deforestation. The rainforest is 17% deforested, and losses are especially pronounced in Brazil, which lost some 1.7 million hectares of rainforest in 2020 alone.
"If you're looking at the area cleared, Brazil is usually the worst," Walker said. And of that, "cattle is the single biggest driver" of loss.
Walker notes that starting in the mid-2000s, the country saw about a decade of positive momentum on the issue. "There was a suite of public and private measures that was aiming to encourage production away from the forest frontier," she said. But in recent years, that has been reversed.
New research shows that last year, despite an economic recession, Brazil reported a 9% jump in its greenhouse gas emissions. "The principal factor," the authors wrote, "was deforestation."
South America, however, is far from the only region experiencing deforestation. Of the 10 countries that have lost the most tree cover since 2001, only two of them - Brazil and Paraguay - are Amazonian.
One of the places where Walker says trees are most at risk right now is the Democratic Republic of Congo. The country has a large amount of remaining forest but high deforestation rates due to practices such as agricultural clearing, fuelwood harvesting and logging. "The Congo is under threat," she said.
Russia is another area of concern. About half the country is covered in forests, and it has topped Global Forest Watch's list of tree-cover loss since 2001 - with some 69.5 million hectares gone. "A lot of that tends to be for timber," Walker said. While much of that may be managed timber practices, at least a portion of the logging is probably illegal, she said. And with such a large area "it's difficult to police effectively."
China is a primary consumer of Russian timber. Walker said that points to China's broader role as a purchaser of commodities linked to deforestation - whether it's Brazilian cattle hides or palm oil from Southeast Asia.
Yet the news isn't all bad.
Pakistan, for instance, is in the midst of a "Ten Billion Tree Tsunami" reforestation campaign. The project is a combination of tree planting and forest protection initiatives that have previously proved extremely successful.
In Costa Rica, the government has been paying farmers to protect forests near their farms. The project was among the five inaugural winners of Prince William's Earthshot prize, which highlights creative climate solutions and comes with a 1 million euro prize.
The efforts point to Walker's contention that "there doesn't need to be this trade-off" between economics and the environment.
Indonesia is another one of the "bright spots," Davis said. While the country is still losing forests largely to palm oil, Walker said that "they are doing much better than they were."
But addressing the problem in one place often isn't enough.
When only certain countries crack down, Walker said, the problems can just shift to places with "lower enforcement." Papa New Guinea, for instance, has also seen palm oil deforestation. And a recent investigation by the advocacy group Global Witness uncovered palm oil executives in the country disclosing corruption and brutality in secret tapes.
The global nature of deforestation-linked trade is one reason experts see this week's agreement at COP26 as important: More than 100 world leaders representing over 85% of the world's forests again pledged to halt deforestation over the next decade.
"This new set of announcements is largely a reiteration of previous commitments," Davis said. And it comes with similar risks.
Davis questions the roughly $19 billion in funding that governments and the private sector announced. "It's really just an incremental growth in the amount of finance when we need it to be exponential," she said, adding that she'll also be watching how much of the money makes it to actual projects on the ground. "It's one thing to pledge money; it's another thing to spend money."
But Davis also sees some differences this time around. More countries - particularly Brazil and China - are on board, and so is the private sector, which committed $7.2 billion of the funding. That, she said, could play an important role in helping get "deforestation out of the supply chain."
Davis said she also thinks that people - citizens - care more about this issue than in the past and can help propel political change. A recent United Nations survey of public opinion on climate change found that the most popular policy area was conserving forests and land, with over half of respondents supporting the idea.
"I have more hope for that bottom-up public pressure in this decade than the last," she said. "They are the ones that we can [apply] pressure."
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