AUSTRALIA: Cash boost to monitor illegal logging
Updated
Australia is planning to set up a global carbon accounting scheme to fund closer monitoring of countries illegally logging timber. It includes plans to use satellite imagery to track changes in forest cover in countries like Indonesia. The announcement was made at an international ministerial meeting on forests and climate change in Sydney. It follows a $AU200 million fund launched by Canberra earlier this year to help developing nations reduce the amount of greenhouse gas pollution caused by deforestation.
Presenter: Sen Lam
Speakers: Frances Seymour, director-general of the Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research
SEYMOUR: Well I think the Australian government's contribution is quite useful in a number of ways, in the first instance just actually making a commitment of some real money early in the process is important symbolically, and may catalyse other governments to similarly make commitments. I think there are two important potential uses; one is to start the design of new mechanisms that would provide the government or individual landowners with payment to avoid deforestation. But perhaps more importantly the money would be used to invest in developing the so-called readiness for those programs. So it's strengthening policies, strengthening government capacities to address the important problem of deforestation.
LAM: Well your organisation, the Centre for International Forestry Research is based in Indonesia. Indonesia's neighbours in ASEAN have long put up with the haze caused by forest fires. Is land clearing and deforestation still continuing at an alarming rate in Indonesia?
SEYMOUR: I'm afraid that it is, but the Indonesian government is taking the problem quite seriously and is certainly attempting to take steps that would reduce these problems. Look, if it were easy to quit smoking a lot more people would do it. Burning practices are deeply embedded in Indonesia's political economy and it's going to take a lot of coordinated measures to really significantly reduce it. But many of those are on the way.
LAM: Apart from governance failures are there other causes of deforestation?
SEYMOUR: Probably the most important is that as long as profitable to convert forests to agriculture people will clear forests, and so there are a lot of incentives that need to be realigned to be sure that in fact it pays to conserve forests.
LAM: Are there alternatives for the farmers and settlers who clear the forests in order to survive?
SEYMOUR: In some cases there are and in other cases they'll still need to be developed. We saw after the financial crisis in Indonesia ten years ago that the forests really provides an important safety net for those who may lose other sources of income or who may be suffering the effects of drought. And so it's really important to provide new alternative sources of income and one of them may be these new payments for eco-system services that are being envisioned under climate regimes that will pay people to protect forests in the name of storing carbon.
LAM: And Australia itself is trying to balance controlled logging and the conservation of old growth forests. So I guess even developed countries are guilty of deforestation?
SEYMOUR: Well these issues are indeed universal and they're not limited to developing countries. I think what's slightly different is that often in more industralised countries the systems of potential market payment mechanisms for regulatory capacity is more fully developed than in developing countries, and so the policy approaches in developing countries need to take into account that somewhat different institutional context.
LAM: Indeed corruption and inefficiency have long been major factors I think in Indonesian landuse and illegal logging. Is the democratically elected government of President Susilo Bambang Yudhyono tackling the issue head-on from where you sit?
SEYMOUR: Well I think that certainly my colleagues in the Ministry of Forestry are quite concerned about these issues and are very eager to take advantage of the renewed domestic and international attention to forest issues that is coming with the linkage to climate change. And with Indonesia hosting the next conference of the parties to the climate convention in Bali in December there's going to be a lot of opportunity to build domestic consensus about what to do as well as to attract international support to finance that agenda.
