The forestry CDM discussion in CoP-8 in New Delhi centres on issues such as definition of activities (afforestation and reforestation), the modalities and accounting system for temporary certified emissions reduction (TCERs), what the credit period should be, along with additionality and baseline. No decision will be made until CoP-9, which will hopefully serve as the first Meeting of Parties (MoP-1) in 2003. (The Conference of Parties will become a Meeting of Parties, in a kind of ‘members only’ scenario, once the protocol comes into force.)

Indonesia, with its vast forest areas, has ample interest in observing how the forestry CDM negotiation process reveals itself. Institutional feasibility is crucial to CDM implementation; therefore one must assess how forests actually come to be degraded or disappear in Indonesia.

A series of field-studies conducted recently in Sumatera, Kalimantan and Sulawesi have done exactly that. Their findings:

• The demand for forest products has increased significantly in the last three decades, surpassing the capability of forests to provide supply commensurate with demand. The increase of logging industries, both legal and illegal; the large pulp and paper industries; and more area under plantation such as palm oil, have resulted in forest being destroyed and degraded.
• Land-use conflicts have created tension, especially within indigenous and local communities. The problems of land tenure, land use change from forest to a settlement, plantations and farming, as well as regulation — such as the expansion of mining extraction in forest areas — have worsened.
  
  The decentralisation process the government began in 2000 has further squeezed forests. Who’s got authority? Who is responsible? It’s unclear, as are the divisions between the national and local government. Naturally, forests will suffer. However, it is the conflict of authority between the provincial level forestry office — which no longer has much authority, but is still obsessed with its pre-reform attitude — and the district level forestry office — which is convinced that all forests in a given district are for the district to self-manage — that is most worrying. This attempt to corner control has led to decrees that excessively utilise forests or allow mining operations within a protected forest, to cite but two examples.
  
  
• Forest utilisation policies are not made in isolation. Government control over forest lands, the logging concession system and its distribution are all deeply connected with former Indonesian president Suharto’s power games. This could be the reason a few holders owned all the concessions — the top 10 groups of logging companies controlled 27 million hectares (ha) out of 62 million ha in total. In the early reform era in 1997-1998, the government conveyed 12 commitments towards reform of the forestry sector and to ensure sustainable management of forests. This reform largely failed. One wonders whether problems in Indonesia’s forestry sector can be solved at all.

The big question is whether the implementation of forestry CDM, which will primarily take the form of additional financial resources, will overcome those underlying causes, eventually stop deforestation in Indonesia, ultimately reduce emissions and increase the forests’ sequestration capacity. Money, evidently, is not an independent solution to these concerns. CDM alone, therefore, will not reduce forest destruction and degradation in Indonesia. Not until there is, truly, institutional reform.

Moreover, afforestation and reforestation in Indonesia is unlikely to survive illegal logging, forest fires or regulatory changes. This makes investment in forestry CDM in Indonesia very risky indeed. Apply TCER mechanisms; even then the permanence of Indonesian forests remains  largely questionable. Therefore the cause — saving what is left of Indonesian forests — is perhaps best served by a mechanism other than CDM. Is Indonesia’s case a unique one?