JAKARTA: Analysts say that a draft presidential instruction (Inpres) on the postponement of new permits on primary forests and peatlands has ignored national interests and will potentially harm Indonesian forestry businesses.

Sadino, the executive director of legal study at the Forestry Policy Bureau, said Monday that the draft prepared by Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) task force had veered from the Letter of Intent (LoI) agreed to by the governments of Indonesia and Norway last year because it included secondary forests and forests for other purposes.

“The REDD-plus task force does not have adequate understanding of Indonesian forestry and seems to merely follow the interests of foreign companies and non-government organizations,” he said, as quoted by Antara.

According to Sadino, the moratorium should have only included primary forests and peatlands, as stipulated in the LoI.

However, it now includes secondary forests and forests designated for other purposes.

“The draft Inpres would potentially destroy not only the legal order but also the country’s economic stability and instigate conflicts between the central government and regional administrations,” he said, adding that the government might face law suits filed by people or groups who may incur losses caused by the issuance of the new regulation.

Dodik Ridho Nurrochmat of the Bogor Agricultural Institute school of forestry said that the LoI should better accommodate the national interests.

“The LoI should not intimidate national interests. The proposed Inpres should not stop issuance of all forestry permits because some of the permits are allocated to spur economic growth for the sake of the people’s prosperity,” he said. — JP

Source: The Jakarta Post

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Central Sulawesi, which has been chosen as a pilot project for the United Nations REDD plus program, has been very active in ensuring the success of the forest-protection program, a UN official says.

National Programme Director for UN-REDD, Yuyu Rahayu, said Friday that local communities, including forest-dependent indigenous people, particularly in Central Sulawesi, had arranged initiatives related to REDD plus issues, showing an increased awareness of the importance of good management of forests and wise use of forest resources as part of global efforts to fight climate change.

Citing an example, he said the Central Sulawesi governor would establish a REDD plus task force team in 2011, comprising representatives from the local government, civil society organizations and NGOs, and indigenous people.

“It will make Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) of forest carbon as the subject at the center of a future REDD plus mechanism more transparent since all stakeholders will be represented in the task force,” he told The Jakarta Post, adding that the task force would arrange the implementation of UN-REDD activities at province, district, and community levels.

Central Sulawesi was selected as the main pilot province of the UN-REDD Program Indonesia in October last year due to its sizable forests.

Yuyu said that a relentless consultation process involving multi-stakeholders both at national and sub-national levels and facilitated by UN-REDD Indonesia had increased public awareness of the importance of their involvement in REDD plus.

Local NGOs, he said, had developed some activities to prepare for their participation in the implementation of UN-REDD at all levels.

“Local government and NGOs [in Central Sulawesi] are very active in supporting UN-REDD activities,” he said, adding that UN-REDD Indonesia needed to ensure that the benefits of REDD plus could reach the communities in the field.

UN-REDD Indonesia is a collaborative initiative between the Forestry Ministry, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). It assists the implementation of REDD plus projects carried out by the Indonesian government.

Indonesia was chosen as one of the UN-REDD Pilot Countries, along with Bolivia, Congo, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Tanzania, Vietnam and Zambia.

The UN granted US$5.6 million for REDD programs in Indonesia, of which US$2.95 million is managed by the UN-REDD Program Indonesia under the assistance of three UN agencies: FAO, UNEP and UNDP.

Forestry Ministry Secretary-General Hadi Daryanto said the government had made efforts to prevent any negative impact of REDD plus by jointly discussing the free, prior and informed consent of REDD plus projects before implementing any of the projects.

According to The United Nations’ Commission on Human Rights, free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) recognizes the inherent and prior rights of the indigenous people to their land and resources.

Despite achievements, UN-REDD Indonesia activities and projects under UNEP and FAO have been delayed due to different rules and regulations of the two UN agencies.

UN-REDD Indonesia is the first of its kind in terms of a project managed by those three different UN agencies — FAO, UNEP and UNDP — which have different rules and regulations.

Yuyu said the UN-REDD Indonesia project in Central Sulawesi should have been completed in May this year. However, the project has to be extended to May 2012 due to the late start of the project resulting from technical differences among three UN agencies.

FAO, for example, used to provide technical assistance instead of grants, resulting in difficulties in implementing the UN-REDD Indonesia program. Meanwhile, UNEP has experience in arranging proposal-based programs.

Of the US$2.95 million managed by UN-REDD, only $250,000 has been disbursed. (ebf)

UN-REDD Program Participants: Source: UN-REDD Program Indonesia, 2010 JP/Irma

Source: The Jakarta Post

Hackers stole millions of euros in permits during past two months Analysts said the thefts were a serious challenge to the E.U.

system.

The European Commission has suspended trading in permits for greenhouse gas emissions for at least a week after the theft of permits worth millions of euros in a series of online attacks.

The Emissions Trading System had been attacked amid "recurring security breaches" over the past two months, the commission, the executive agency of the European Union, announced on its Web site Wednesday.

The commission said it needed to shut the system down until at least next Wednesday, as "incidents over the last weeks have underlined the urgent need" for enhanced security measures.

The attacks raised new questions about the viability of the bloc’s main tool for battling the rise in greenhouse gases.

The stolen permits are part of an E.U.wide system that caps the amount of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, that companies may emit each year.The E.U.system is the largest market in the world for credits for greenhouse gas emissions.

Companies exceeding their emissions quotas can buy certificates from companies that succeeded in shrinking their carbon footprints by, for example, adopting environmentally friendly technology or modifying production in other ways.

Some of the thefts of credits early this week were from electronic registries in Austria, Greece, the Czech Republic, Poland and Estonia, said Maria Kokkonen, a spokeswoman for Connie Hedegaard, the E.U. commissioner for climate action.

"It could be a concerted action by fraudsters to get access and steal permits from legitimate accounts to sellon spot markets before the thefts were discovered," Ms. Kokkonen said.

The permits stolen from the Czech registry were worth about ¤7 million, or $9.4 million, she said. She was unable to comment on the value of the allowances stolen in other countries.

Analysts said the thefts were a serious challenge to the E.U. system, which the bloc wants other parts of the world, including the United States, to emulate.

"Although such incidents are negligible in terms of actual market impact, they will overtime undermine the credibility of carbon trading as a policy measure to reduce emissions in Europe," said Kjersti Ulset, am anager at Point Carbon, a companyt hat reports on emissions markets and provides consultancy services.

The commission issued security guidelines after a similar attack in early 2010, but the latest incident will almost certainly oblige the authorities to invest in new and more secure hardware.

"By investing tens of thousands of euros to upgrade their I.T. systems, member states could prevent losses on the scale of millions of euros," Ms. Kokkonen said, referring to information technology systems.

The E.U. system has had a rocky ride since trading began six years ago, including extreme volatility, tax fraud, the recycling of used credits and suspicions of profiteering, in addition to cyberattacks.

In the incident a year ago, swindlers used faked e-mail messages to obtain access codes for individual accounts on national carbon registries. Traders and companies that fell for the ploy were directed to a rogue Web site and invited to enter their security codes —apractice known as ‘‘phishing’’ in the jargon of the Internet.

The swindlers used the stolen codes to gain access to electronic certificates that represent quantities of greenhouse gases. They then sold the certificates through trading accounts registered in Denmark and Britain.

That attack was estimated to have netted the swindlers as much as $4 million from Germany alone.

Ms. Kokkonen said Wednesday that it was stillu nclear what methods had been used to steal the permits in the latest spate of attacksb ecause the national authorities were still looking into the matter. (By JAMES KANTER)

Source: mydigitalfc.com

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Indonesia missed the Jan. 1, 2011 targeted start of a two-year moratorium on forest-clearing, a major part of the US$1 billion letter of intent (LoI) it signed with Norway in Oslo last May.

Activists say the delay will cause legal uncertainty for businesses, in addition to more damage to the environment and to Indonesia’s already bad environmental image in the international community.

“Missing the targeted Jan. 1 start of the moratorium creates a bad perception of Indonesia’s stance on environmental issues at an international level because the President himself made that commitment,” leader for the non-governmental organization (NGO) Greenpeace Southeast Asia forest team Bustar Maitar said on Wednesday.

“It also gives industries one legal uncertainty after another in doing businesses here.”

Bustar said the Norwegian government, after pledging to give Indonesia US$1 billion in aid, might question the Indonesian government’s commitment to the matter because of the delay.

He said the key points of the LoI were that Indonesia carried out a moratorium on land-clearing and chose a province for a pilot project under the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program in the country.

President Susilo Bambang Yu-dhoyono announced on Dec. 30, 2010 that Central Kalimantan would host the REDD+ pilot project. The announcement also came late, its deadline set for October 2010.

Although Central Kalimantan will receive full support for the project, other forested provinces — Aceh, Jambi, Riau, South Sumatra, West Kalimantan, East Kalimantan, Papua and West Papua — will be provided with technical support for additional projects.

Echoing Bustar, Elfian Effendi, executive director of Greenomics — an NGO focused on forestry and mining — said legal uncertainties extended to the international spheres of businesses, environment and bureaucracy due the delay.

“Legal uncertainty is occurring in all sectors, including in the bureaucracy, because there’s still a disagreement among government institutions,” Elfian said.

The Forestry Ministry has proposed that the President only ban new permits to clear primary forests and peatlands for two years, while the Presidential Work Unit for Development and Control wants the ban to include secondary forests, review existing permits and consider extending the time frame, Reuters reported.

Primary forests are untouched while secondary forests have been selectively logged, though boundaries are often unclear and illegal logging is rampant in one of Asia’s most corrupt countries. Forests soak up the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the Reuters report added.

The President’s special assistant on climate change and chairman of the National Climate Change
Board, Agus Purnomo, admitted the delay.

“But there is nothing crucial about it. It’s only a matter of definitions and formulation,” he said, adding it would soon be completed but no exact deadline had been set.

Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa has claimed how the LoI silver-lined the entire UN climate change debate in Cancun, Mexico, recently.

“The LoI with Norway was a groundbreaking effort on our part to present ourselves as part of the solution. If it’s properly packaged and presented … if we can be part of the solution, we can really make a huge impact on climate,” he said. (By Mustaqim Adamrah)

Source: The Jakarta Post

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