REDD Progress in RI Could Spark New Deal in Cancun

Indonesia's REDD Progress

With just weeks to go before the Cancun climate summit, Indonesia's progress on implementing its REDD framework is generating cautious optimism among international climate negotiators. Officials and analysts familiar with the negotiations say that the tangible steps taken by Jakarta — including advances in forest monitoring systems, sub-national pilot programs, and the institutional architecture for REDD+ oversight — could provide the kind of real-world credibility that REDD+ needs to break through as a major feature of any Cancun agreement.

"What Indonesia is doing matters enormously for Cancun," said one senior negotiator involved in the REDD+ technical discussions. "If the country with the world's highest deforestation rate and the most complex forest governance challenges can show meaningful progress, it makes the case that REDD+ is not just a theoretical construct but something that actually works on the ground."

Indonesia's progress has been uneven and contested. Conservation groups point to the ongoing delay in implementing the promised moratorium on new logging permits and to the continued advance of oil palm and pulp plantations in areas that REDD+ is supposed to protect. But proponents of Indonesia's REDD program argue that the institutional groundwork being laid — the monitoring systems, the reference levels, the governance structures — is essential infrastructure whose value will compound over time.

Norway Partnership: Latest Developments

The Indonesia-Norway partnership, announced at the Oslo Climate and Forest Conference in May 2010 with Norway pledging up to one billion dollars, remains the flagship bilateral forest deal in the world and the most closely watched test of results-based forest conservation finance. The partnership has provided both financial resources and international attention that have elevated forest conservation higher on the Indonesian political agenda than it might otherwise have reached.

The first phase of the partnership's financial commitments has been used primarily for readiness activities — helping Indonesia develop the institutional and technical systems needed for REDD+ implementation. This includes support for the national forest monitoring system, capacity building in the Ministry of Forestry, and engagement with provincial governments and communities about REDD+ design.

Norwegian officials have been careful to maintain pressure on Indonesia to deliver on its commitments while also acknowledging the genuine complexity of the governance challenge. "We know that turning around a system with decades of entrenched interests is not something that happens overnight," one Norwegian diplomat said. "What we're looking for is credible progress — real institutional change and measurable reductions in deforestation — not perfection."

Expectations for COP16 in Cancun

The Cancun climate conference faces a difficult political environment, with the collapse of prospects for US climate legislation following the midterm elections dampening hopes for the kind of grand bargain that eluded negotiators at Copenhagen. However, REDD+ negotiations are widely seen as more politically manageable than the broader emission reduction framework, and there is growing consensus that Cancun can deliver a significant step forward on forests even if the overall climate agreement falls short of ambition.

The key elements of a Cancun REDD+ agreement are largely agreed at the technical level. The scope of activities, the environmental and social safeguards, the approach to national forest monitoring, and the framework for reference levels are all issues where technical negotiators have made substantial progress. What remains to be agreed is largely political — including questions about the financing arrangements that would support REDD+ implementation and the relationship between national REDD+ programs and international carbon markets.

Indonesia's practical experience with REDD+ implementation is expected to inform the Cancun discussions in important ways. The challenges encountered in Indonesia — including the difficulty of implementing a moratorium in the face of conflicting government interests, the complexity of establishing credible reference levels, and the importance of community engagement — provide lessons that can improve the design of the international REDD+ framework.

Challenges That Remain

Despite the progress, significant challenges remain for both Indonesia's national REDD+ program and the broader international framework. The moratorium, which was supposed to be in place by January 2011, had still not been implemented at the time of this writing, with various government ministries reportedly still debating what types of land should be covered. This delay has raised concerns about whether the political will exists within the Indonesian government to actually implement the commitments made in the Norway deal.

The question of how to include local communities and indigenous peoples in REDD+ design and benefit sharing remains contentious. Civil society organisations have argued that too many REDD+ discussions are happening at the national and international levels without meaningful participation from the communities whose forests and livelihoods are most directly affected. Without genuine community buy-in, REDD+ risks creating conservation measures that are resented rather than supported at the local level, undermining their long-term effectiveness.

Financing at the scale needed for REDD+ to achieve its potential remains a challenge. The bilateral deals struck so far, while significant, represent only a fraction of the financing that economists estimate would be needed to halt tropical deforestation. Unlocking private capital through carbon markets — whether voluntary or compliance — will require resolving outstanding questions about carbon accounting, additionality, and permanence that have proved difficult to agree in international negotiations.

Frequently Asked Questions

What progress had Indonesia made on REDD+ before the Cancun summit?+

In the months leading up to COP16 in Cancun, Indonesia had made tangible if incomplete progress on several fronts of REDD+ implementation. The country had worked to advance its national forest monitoring system, building on existing satellite-based deforestation detection capabilities and developing protocols for integrating remote sensing with ground-based inventory data. This technical work was essential for establishing the measurement, reporting, and verification system that REDD+ payments depend on.

Indonesia had also conducted initial consultations on the design of its national REDD+ strategy and the approach to establishing a national forest reference emission level. The reference level — a historical baseline against which future emission reductions would be measured — was a technically challenging and politically sensitive issue, as it would determine both the scale of potential payments and the ambition of Indonesia's deforestation reduction commitments.

At the sub-national level, several provinces had developed REDD+ pilot programmes with support from international donors, NGOs, and research institutions. These pilots were designed to test approaches to monitoring, community engagement, benefit sharing, and governance that could eventually be scaled up to national level. The pilots generated important lessons about what works in Indonesian conditions and provided a practical foundation for national REDD+ strategy development.

The establishment of Indonesia's REDD+ Task Force, chaired by the head of the president's delivery unit for development monitoring, signalled high-level political commitment to implementation. By placing the oversight function outside the Ministry of Forestry — which had historically been associated with the logging and plantation interests that were major drivers of deforestation — the government attempted to create an accountability mechanism that could oversee progress more independently.

Why was Indonesia seen as a key test case for REDD+?+

Indonesia occupied a unique position as a test case for REDD+ for several reasons. First, it has one of the world's largest and most carbon-rich tropical forest areas, making the potential climate benefit of successful REDD+ implementation in the country enormous. Second, it has one of the world's highest historical deforestation rates, meaning the challenge of reducing emissions is severe and the governance obstacles to be overcome are correspondingly formidable.

Third, Indonesia had secured the largest bilateral forest conservation commitment in history through its partnership with Norway, providing a real-world test of whether large-scale results-based payments could change the political economy of deforestation in a major forest country. The Indonesia-Norway deal was watched closely by the international community as a proof of concept for the REDD+ mechanism.

Fourth, Indonesia had a diverse and complex governance environment — federal and local governments, large corporates, smallholder farmers, indigenous communities, and civil society organisations all had stakes in forest management. If REDD+ could work in this complex institutional environment, the lessons would be broadly applicable to other forest countries. If it failed in Indonesia, it would raise serious questions about the mechanism's applicability in challenging governance contexts.

The international attention on Indonesia's REDD+ program also created a feedback loop that itself affected implementation. The scrutiny of NGOs, researchers, journalists, and donor governments kept forest issues on the political agenda in Indonesia and created accountability pressures that would not have existed without the global spotlight. Whether this external attention was ultimately helpful or created perverse incentives for performance on paper rather than on the ground was itself a subject of debate.

What did the Cancun Agreements deliver for REDD+?+

The Cancun Agreements, adopted at COP16 in December 2010, represented a significant step forward for REDD+ by formalising the mechanism's framework within the UNFCCC process. The key REDD+ decision, contained in paragraph 70 of the Cancun decision on land use, established the scope of activities eligible under REDD+ — reducing emissions from deforestation, reducing emissions from forest degradation, conservation of forest carbon stocks, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks.

The Cancun decision also adopted a set of environmental and social safeguards that countries must respect and promote when implementing REDD+ activities. These safeguards, sometimes called the "Cancun safeguards," addressed the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, the conservation of biodiversity, the importance of transparent and participatory governance, and the need to ensure the permanence of emission reductions. They represented an important victory for civil society organisations that had pushed for strong safeguards throughout the REDD+ negotiations.

On national forest monitoring, the Cancun decision called on countries to develop national forest monitoring systems, forest reference emission levels or forest reference levels, and systems for providing information on how the Cancun safeguards were being addressed. These requirements created a framework for the measurement, reporting, and verification system that is the backbone of results-based REDD+ payments.

The decision also agreed on a phased approach to REDD+ implementation, moving from readiness capacity building through demonstration activities to results-based payments. This phased approach allowed countries at different stages of institutional development to participate in REDD+ at appropriate levels without having to meet all requirements from the outset.

How does Indonesia's forestry sector corruption affect REDD+ implementation?+

Corruption in the Indonesian forestry sector is widely regarded as one of the most fundamental obstacles to effective REDD+ implementation. The sector has historically been a major site of corrupt transactions involving the allocation of logging and plantation concessions, the misappropriation of reforestation funds, the facilitation of illegal timber operations, and the manipulation of spatial data to make forest clearing appear to comply with regulations.

Under REDD+, corruption creates specific risks that go beyond the general governance problems affecting forest management. If the financial flows generated by REDD+ payments are captured by corrupt officials rather than channelled to communities and programs that actually protect forests, the mechanism will fail to deliver the conservation outcomes on which payment depends. There are also risks that forest monitoring data could be manipulated to misrepresent deforestation trends and claim payments for fictitious emission reductions.

International donors and technical partners have invested significantly in anti-corruption measures as part of REDD+ implementation support in Indonesia. These include support for independent monitoring by civil society organisations, transparent disclosure of concession data and monitoring results, the development of independent verification procedures, and capacity building for anti-corruption agencies in the forestry sector. The One Map initiative, which aims to resolve conflicting spatial data across government agencies, also has anti-corruption dimensions by making it harder to issue overlapping or fraudulent concessions.

The relationship between REDD+ finance and corruption risk is complex. On one hand, the prospect of large financial flows through REDD+ creates new opportunities for rent-seeking and misappropriation. On the other hand, the transparency requirements of REDD+ — including public disclosure of monitoring data, deforestation maps, and payment flows — can serve as a countercorruption tool by making it harder to conceal illicit activities. Whether the net effect is positive or negative depends heavily on the institutional design of individual programmes and the strength of civil society monitoring.

What has happened with Indonesia's REDD+ programme since Cancun?+

In the years following the Cancun agreements, Indonesia's REDD+ programme has continued to evolve through periods of progress and setback. The moratorium on new primary forest and peatland concessions was eventually issued in May 2011 and has been periodically renewed, though it has consistently been criticised for its exemptions and implementation gaps. The moratorium area has been progressively expanded to cover more forest land, but enforcement in remote areas remains challenging.

The Indonesia-Norway partnership delivered results-based payments following the verification of measurable emission reductions from deforestation in subsequent years. These payments, which totalled hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of the partnership, represented the first large-scale results-based payments under a bilateral forest conservation agreement and provided valuable evidence about the feasibility of this approach.

The legal recognition of indigenous community forests (hutan adat) following the Constitutional Court ruling in 2013 was a significant advance, enabling communities to formally claim management rights over forests that they have traditionally governed. The process of actually registering these community forests has been slow, but the legal precedent represents an important institutional change with long-term significance for forest tenure security.

Despite these advances, deforestation in Indonesia has remained far above the levels needed to meet Paris Agreement targets. The expansion of oil palm, acacia, and other plantation industries has continued to drive forest clearing, particularly in Kalimantan and Papua. The gap between institutional progress and on-the-ground conservation outcomes reflects deep structural challenges that will require sustained political commitment and fundamental changes in the economics of land use to address.