Competing views on Forests and REDD: From CIFOR, to Rizaldi Boer to Yuyun Indradi

The 16th of June I spent in Bogor with a marathon of meetings and interviews with Indonesian forest experts. I learned that the variety of views is as wide as known from Europe.

CIFOR
The day starts off with a series of meetings with CIFOR staff - probably the single most important reference for applied forest research world-wide. Amongst others, I get to know Robert, the Program Director for Environmental Services and Sustainable Use of Forests, who is skeptical of efforts to combine reduced emissions, biodiversity and livelihoods and tells me sometimes you have to make hard choices. I meet Yves, the Ecologist, who is convinced of the usefulness of strengthening the land tenure and management rights of local communities to preserve the environmental services of the forests, at the example of the Moluccas model, only blocked by the Indonesian central government. His colleague Carol, an anthropologist, also sees a pivotal role for forest communities. She draws attention to the the fact that even the communities practicing shifting cultivation, burn maybe one hectare of forest for it, while big companies destroy millions of hectares.

Maurice, dubbed “Mr. Palm oil”, doubts these ideas of his CIFOR colleagues. In his eyes, you have to create jobs outside the forests, in the cities for forest people if you want to prevent them from selling their land to the logging and mining companies as soon as they get land-tenure rights. He praises palm oil plantations as providers of a salary for the rural people, while Yves puts a big question mark behind the claims of palm oil companies to manage their plantations in a sustainable way.

REDD & Climate Change: From Rizaldi Boer to Yuyun Indradi
At the end of the day, I meet two Indonesians who are just back from the Bonn climate change talks: Rizaldi Boer and Yuyun Indradi. Rizaldi is a co-author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Reports and by many in the Climate Change community considered as Indonesian REDD coryphée. Yuyun has earned a reputation as community-forestry and biodiversity expert in the NGO community. Two men, two schools of thought. Rizaldi teaches at the Bogor Agricultural University, Yuyun studied at the agricultural faculty in Yogyakarta. Rizaldi´s main topic is creating incentive-structures for companies to reduces emissions and to include aforestation and reforestation of degraded land into REDD. Yuyun´s main concern is about recognizing the rights and sustainable forest management practices of forest communities. Rizaldi´s main message to the EU is: Open up the European carbon market for forest credits. Yuyun advocates in contrast Greenpeace´s proposal to keep the markets separate with industrialized countries taking over responsibility for avoided deforestation measures in developing countries on top of substantial emissions reductions achieved by them back home.

Only half a year remains to build bridges to overcome such cleavages of opinion for an agreement in Copenhagen which caters for as many needs and circumvents as many risks as possible.