The future of a much-vaunted $30 million Australian project to protect Indonesian forests for their carbon is in doubt after an independent review found it is not the best use of the money.
The project on the island of Sumatra was announced by Labor in early 2010 to international fanfare, but so far there has been little detail about the project’s design.
It is understood there has been no actual on-ground work in Sumatra and officials to date have done research only.
It is the second Australian-Indonesian carbon project to face setbacks. The Herald reported in March that a $47 million project to restore peatland in Kalimantan, launched in 2007, had quietly been scaled back and was suffering major delays.
Indonesia is recognised as the world’s fifth-largest producer of greenhouse gases, with 60 per cent of its emissions coming from rapid deforestation and associated activities.
The review of Australia’s Indonesian carbon programs, costing $100 million overall, found the Sumatran project ”may not be the most effective utilisation of available funding and that the changing policy context provides an opportunity for reconsideration of the proposal”.
A spokesman for the Climate Change Minister, Greg Combet, said Australia was discussing with the Indonesian government alternative approaches to work in Sumatra.
”Work has not started on the ground because we have not yet agreed on the revised scope of work,” the spokesman said.
The Sumatra project is a pilot for a proposed global system, known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, in which developing nations could earn money from carbon credits created from forest preservation projects by selling them to rich countries for use in meeting their emission reduction targets.
The independent review was handed to the government early last year, but was only made public by the Australian overseas aid agency AusAID in recent weeks.
It calls for the ”reconsideration” of the Sumatra pilot in light of the challenges and delays in the Kalimantan project and the emergence of other Indonesian forest schemes, including a $1 billion investment by Norway.
