Indonesia Government Slows Logging Permits Before Ban

Fidelis E. Satriastanti Jakarta Globe 29 Oct 10;

Jakarta. Amid pressure from environmentalists to fast-track a planned moratorium on logging permits, a senior official says the government has not issued concessions for natural forests and peatlands since 2009.

Under an agreement signed by Indonesia and Norway in Oslo in May, Indonesia has vowed to stop issuing forestry permits for peatland and primary natural forests for two years.

That moratorium is set to take effect from Jan. 1, 2011.

In return, Norway will set up a $1 billion fund for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD-Plus) schemes, a UN-backed carbon trading mechanism, in Indonesian forests.

The money will be disbursed into three phases: $30 million for preparation, $170 million for transformation, including implementing the moratorium on permits, and $800 million for verification of emissions reduction.

The agreement is part of Indonesia’s commitment to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 26 percent by 2020, or by 41 percent with international aid.

“The moratorium is nothing new because the forestry minister has clearly stated he has never issued new permits” to open natural forests and peatlands, Agus Purnomo, a presidential adviser for climate change, told the Jakarta Globe on Friday.

“It also won’t require any new legal instrument, because if the minister wants to maintain the policy until the end of his term, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Agus said the forestry minister’s policy of not issuing logging permits for certain areas had been challenged by some special interest groups. “Lots of people want this policy, and the planned moratorium, to fall through, often by using legal arguments against the definition of natural forests,” he said.

“Ideally, we need a set of regulations and laws to define [terms], but that would take 10 years,” he added.

“Basically, what we’re doing right now is forestry reform, which means fixing forestry management in this country.”

Agus also said a national task force supervising REDD-Plus projects was preparing a Web site for monitoring forest destruction through satellite images, which is expected to go live in two weeks.

“One of our problems is that we don’t have accurate, unified data,” he said. “You can find four different maps from one institution. We’re trying to fix that because we need a unified source of trusted data.”