Posted on 29 September
2011 Jakarta, Indonesia - The Nature Conservancy
and WWF are joining with the Indonesian
and US Governments today to sign a debt-for-nature
swap agreement that will result in a new
US$28.5 million investment to help protect
tropical forests
in three districts of Kalimantan, Indonesian
Borneo.
The deal will create
models for forest conservation and sustainable
economic development in Borneo, the third-largest
island in the world, home to unique species
such as orangutans, gibbons, clouded leopards,
“pygmy” elephants, hornbills, and up to
15,000 flowering plants.
The districts of Berau
and Kutai Barat in East Kalimantan Province
and Kapuas Hulu in West Kalimantan Province
each contain carbon-rich tropical forest
and vast biodiversity under threat from
unsustainable natural resource extraction.
These forests can serve as examples of sustainable
development to the rest of Indonesia and
the world.
“This is an important step forward in efforts
to save one of the world’s richest forest
ecosystems and provide economic security
for the millions who depend on those forests,”
said Tom Dillon, Senior VP for Field Programs
at WWF in the United States. “Any way you
look at it, this is a winning situation
for Indonesia – enabling it to use these
funds to protect globally spectacular biodiversity
in the Heart of Borneo and fight climate
change.”
Greg Fishbein, Managing
Director for Forest Carbon at the Conservancy,
added, “This deal will demonstrate how Indonesia
can grow and create jobs in a smarter way
that minimizes impact on the forest, improves
the livelihoods of local communities, and
ultimately allows the Government to achieve
its twin goals of 7 percent economic growth
and up to a 41 percent reduction in carbon
emissions by 2020.”
Borneo – its territory shared by Indonesia,
Malaysia and Brunei – was once almost entirely
forested, but between 1985 and 2005, the
island lost an average of 2.1 million acres
of forest every year. Only half of Kalimantan’s
forest cover remains.
This forest destruction has impacted local
communities – about eight million people
live in West and East Kalimantan – who have
lost a portion of their food, water, medicine,
and building resources. Forest loss has
also impacted the island’s thousands of
plant and animal species, some found nowhere
else on Earth.
The forests also contain
vast amounts of carbon, which makes them
a crucial part of President Yudhoyono’s
pledge to fight climate change by reducing
Indonesia’s carbon dioxide emissions by
up to 41 percent by 2020. Forest loss, conversion
of forests, and land use change in Indonesia
are the largest sources of carbon pollution,
accounting for over 60 percent of Indonesia’s
total annual emissions.
Major threats to the forests and biodiversity
of Borneo include expansion of oil palm
plantations, illegal and unsustainable logging
practices, and mining.
The debt swap will address these threats
by investing in improved land-use planning
to direct development to already degraded
lands, improved management of protected
areas, and other critical measures to reduce
forest destruction, while supporting economic
growth and local communities.
The swap will focus
investment in three critical Districts.
District Governments have tremendous influence
on land-use decisions in Indonesia, and
are of manageable scale to achieve near
term results. Developing model programs
across entire District boundaries, as partnerships
of District, National and Provincial Governments,
can help move Indonesia down a pathway towards
national success.
The agreement is authorized under the US
Tropical Forest Conservation Act (TFCA),
which allows countries such as Indonesia
to re-direct debt to the U.S. to forest
conservation purposes. WWF and the Conservancy
each contributed US$2 million to the deal.
