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KALIMANTAN CENTRAL: He started illegally felling trees when he was 13 or 14 years old, after finishing elementary school.
Alianur, a native of central Kalimantan, had to help his parents, so he accompanied his father on trips despite the risk of being caught by the forest police. The walks through the woods took two hours, he recalled.
The lack of education forced him to continue on this path. When he had a family of his own, logging missions meant being away from his wife and children for a month at a time.
“Sometimes I would work with friends, but sometimes I was alone and the risk was quite high,” the 40-year-old told the Insight program. “Inside, the forest was really calm. We could only hear the song of the birds. “
Alianur, a native of central Kalimantan, was an illegal logger for most of his adult life.
Alianur, who has a name, could cut 50 pieces of wood in one day, and each tree produced two to three pieces about four meters long. He said he could sell about eight cubic meters of wood a month to logging companies, earning eight million rupees (S $ 740).
Three years ago, he decided to switch to making coconut sugar.
He received training from a company called Rimba Makmur Utama, which manages about 157,000 hectares of land, including peat forests in Central Kalimantan. That’s more than twice the size of Singapore.
And the company has embraced a climate finance model that could play an important role in saving the forests of Indonesia and the world.
‘THE STRONGEST DEFENSE AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE’
Forests are the “strongest defense against climate change,” said Kiki Taufik, global director of the forestry campaign for the advocacy group Greenpeace Southeast Asia.
But between 2001 and 2019, Indonesia lost 9.6 million hectares of forests, according to data from the Ministry of Environment and Forestry. About 56 percent occurred in pulp and paper, palm oil and logging concessions, he said.
The country is now losing about 0.4 million hectares of forest a year, noted scientist Herry Purnomo of the Center for International Forestry Research.
Rimba Makmur Utama, however, protects and restores peat forests within its government-awarded Ecosystem Restoration Concession, in a project called Katingan Mentaya, named after two rivers that flow there.
Indonesia’s natural forest cover was about 113 million ha in 1990 and about 88 million ha in 2019.
Peatlands are made up of partially decomposed plant matter and store large amounts of carbon, which is released into the atmosphere if the land is drained or burned.
Peat fires have caused some of the worst haze episodes in Southeast Asia, including one in 2015 that is estimated to have caused more than 100,000 premature deaths in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia and $ 16 billion (Singapore $ 21.5 billion). in economic losses only in Indonesia.
READ: Little smoke this foggy season, but fires continue in Indonesia
Rimba Makmur Utama also protects the habitats of species like the Bornean orangutan and creates sustainable employment for local residents like Alianur.
“We can provide them with better livelihoods, better education, better health,” said CEO Dharsono Hartono, who co-founded the company in 2007.
In doing so, it has avoided more than 30 million tons in carbon emissions.
Peatlands emit large amounts of carbon when they are drained or burned.
Its climate finance scheme calls for companies like automaker Volkswagen and energy giant Shell to buy carbon credits or offsets as part of their climate commitments. Each credit is equivalent to one ton of carbon dioxide and the money finances Katingan Mentaya’s initiatives.
In general, forest carbon credits cost between US $ 5 and US $ 10 each.
Although 2020 was dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Dharsono said it was a good year as clients continued to buy credits, certified by third parties.
“Increasingly, customers understand the value of protecting nature,” he said. “Of course, we still have a long way to go.”
Dharsono Hartono is the CEO of Rimba Makmur Utama.
Katingan Mentaya is part of REDD + (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), a mechanism developed under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that incentivizes forest conservation by creating financial value for stored carbon.
WHAT ELSE SHOULD INDONESIA DO?
Ruandha Agung Sugardiman, director general for climate change at the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, said Indonesia aims to further reduce its annual rate of deforestation to 250,000 hectares by 2030.
“This is an extraordinary effort, especially on the part of law enforcement. Our main emphasis is on forest and ground fires, ”he said.
Space technology has made it easier to identify areas that have been illegally logged.
“Based on satellite images, we would dispatch our team and conduct an investigation on the ground. We would know the size of the areas affected by illegal logging, the amount of wood and we can immediately calculate the damage, “he said.
“Big companies will not be able to escape due to extremely severe penalties. They can be administrative or criminal sanctions. “
Peat and plantation fires have caused record levels of haze in the region in recent years.
Indonesia also aims to rehabilitate 12 million hectares of degraded land by 2030 using funds from its state budget and international supporters, Ruandha said. In addition, it aims to restore two million hectares of peatlands by 2030.
Environmentalists said authorities are heading in the right direction, but challenges such as transparency in land permits, law enforcement and commercial interests remain.
The Omnibus Law passed last year aims to create jobs, but will weaken environmental protection, Greenpeace’s Kiki said. The construction of the Trans-Papua Highway in the easternmost region of Indonesia threatens the forests of Papua, Indonesia’s “last forest frontier,” he added.
READ: Indonesia’s employment law endangers the environment, say activists and investors
The lack of transparency and public access to Indonesian land concession maps also makes it difficult to know where exactly various concessions are located (coal mining or oil palm, for example), where they overlap, and where the concessions are. community areas, he cited.
LOOK: Indonesia’s Disappearing Forests: Too Few, Too Late for Asia’s Largest Rainforest? (48:50)
Meanwhile, projects like Katingan Mentaya are making a difference.
Citrus farmer Aliansyah, 55, used to clear the land with the slash-and-burn technique, but stopped doing it five years ago after receiving training in alternative clearing methods.
“If you clean the land by burning it, the plants can only grow once. If we do it organically, the trees will grow well, ”he said. “I support that approach.”
These days, Alianur spends more time with his family in the Sampit district and no longer has to worry about getting caught by the police.
In his previous life, he was arrested twice and said he had to pay bribes of around 500,000 rupees each time to avoid jail time.
Once an illegal logger, Alianur no longer has to fear being caught by the forest police.
Amid the pandemic, he can earn around four million rupees a month – demand for coconut sugar, produced in the Katingan Mentaya buffer zone and used for cooking and baking, has been sustained.
“If the forests disappear, perhaps the people of Kalimantan will also disappear,” he said.
Check out this episode of Insight here. The show airs on Thursdays at 9 pm.
