Australia in bid to repair ecological ruin: peat swamps in Kalimantan

Tom Allard, The Age 14 Dec 09;

A BOAT trip down the wide brown waters of the Kapuas River and the canals that flow off it, crisscrossing the hinterland of Central Kalimantan, makes for a depressing tour.

What was once one of the world's great swamp peat forests is a tangle of weeds and burnt trees. The rich peat, one of the world's great stores of carbon, is dry and crumbles at first touch, degraded each dry season by fires lit by local farmers.

The mills along the banks of the Kapuas are testament to the ongoing illegal logging that is denuding the area of what trees remain.

Even a rare sighting of a female orangutan cradling her baby in a small grove of trees by one of the canals fails to enliven the mood. She hollers in distress and throws debris at the passing canoes as if to condemn their human cargo for the destruction.

Amid the ecological ruins of a colossally ill-conceived project by former Indonesian dictator Suharto to convert 1.4 million hectares of wetland forest into an enormous rice farm, the Australian Government has undertaken an ambitious effort to rehabilitate the land.

Moreover, it hopes the project - a joint venture with the Indonesian Government - will provide a template for how a global emissions trading system might work.

It's not quite money growing on trees, but should the $40 million scheme come to fruition, the impoverished locals will get money to grow trees and preserve those that already exist under the UN-backed Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation plan.

REDD, as it is known, is the centre of heated negotiations at the Copenhagen conference. It will allow developing nations like Indonesia to generate income by selling credits for their forests that soak up carbon to richer countries to offset their own carbon emissions.

For its proponents, it's a panacea that could not only save forests and combat climate change, but enrich impoverished communities along the way.

''What we hope to achieve is a form of win-win situation where we achieve emissions reduction targets but also improve local livelihoods through support for improved farming practices and the potential to generate incentive payments through REDD,'' says Neil Scotland, the AusAID officer overseeing the project.

Critics, however, say that it's an attempt by the developed world to gain cut-price credits to offset their own emissions, thereby doing little to reduce overall global warming. Moreover, such schemes are incredibly complex to set up, open to abuse and offer no guarantees the money generated will find its way to the local community.

Muliadi, the secretary general of Central Kalimantan's association of peat land farmers, said he was aware of the AusAID project - which was announced in 2007 - but that neither he or his members had been contacted by organisers.

''We are the people who traditionally keep the forests and the environment and have been living here for generations,'' he said. ''REDD has been talked about everywhere. Climate change is also the topic everywhere. But the local people in Central Kalimantan have never been invited to any discussion or seminar or any occasion like that.''

Mr Scotland says broaching the topic of REDD payments is fraught, not least because the scheme has yet to be agreed as a concept at the Copenhagen conference.

''We have to be able to discuss these issues with subsistence farmers who live very much from day to day. They are uncertain about what they are going to eat that night … it's really a very large gulf you have to bridge and working out ways to bridge that is very important.''

Communication efforts, thus far, are centring on encouraging farmers not to burn the land before planting, and building trust by advocating small scale income generating schemes. Even so, fires are an annual scourge. The peat smoulders for months each dry season, sending plumes of smoke across Kalimantan and up to Singapore and Malaysia. Only the monsoon rains can put out the subsurface fires.

Illegal logging remains an ongoing issue, operating openly along the Kapuas River and fuelled by widespread corruption.

According to a recent report by Human Rights Watch, the rampant graft means it is highly problematic that any REDD scheme could be enforced in Indonesia.

And then there is the incredible complexity of pricing carbon from peatland forests. Scientists are struggling to agree how much carbon is stored in such areas and developing a formula for pricing any carbon credits remains elusive.

If, as appears likely, any emissions reduction undertakings by the developed world are modest at Copenhagen, it will mean there will be less demand for carbon credits, reducing their price and the money flowing to the villagers of Central Kalimantan.