Australian
Thursday 28/8/2008 Page: 9
AN Australian not-for-profit company has joined Indonesia's carbon credits stampede with a project it claims will sidestep the 'snake-oil merchants and carpetbaggers" in the market. Australian forestry businessman Nigel Turvey is behind the scheme, which will be launched tomorrow with a 30,000ha project in Mamuju, West Sulawesi. Rather than targeting high volume illegal logging, the project is based on halting already approved logging by an Indonesian state-private joint enterprise forestry company.
"We're not calling this a carbon credits project," he said. "We're simply saying, this is the price of timber, this is what it will cost to stop cutting down forests. We're also not asking that the forests be locked up for 99 years, which is more how the carbon credits market operates." The Mamuju endeavour will cost $US6.5 million ($7.5 million) annually, with the money coming from Indonesian and foreign businesses, including, Dr Turvey hopes, Australian firms.
It is to be launched by Indonesia's forestry minister, MS Kaban, who has been implicated in corruption scandals. Three similar projects are expected to begin in Kalimantan, Sumatra and Papua under the supervision of Dr Turvey's Keep the Habitat company, for a commitment of 500,000ha. Australia has pledged about $240 million to greenhouse gas reduction projects in Southeast Asia, much of it to be spent in Indonesia. Little of that money has yet been allocated and Dr Turvey said his project would not be lobbying for any of it.
Under the terms of the UN's Kyoto Protocol, developed countries are allowed to buy so-called carbon credits by investing in developing countries, to discount against their own greenhouse gas productions. More and more companies have spotted the golden business opportunity this provides by buying and selling credits without any clear oversight on how the money is spent.
Dr Turvey, who said there were "snake oil merchants and carpetbaggers in any new market", said his project's strongest contribution was in the area of governance. "We have clear terms in our agreements about how we sub-contract, and if we need to sack contractors, we can," he said. Dr Turvey said he became interested in the Indonesian project after working in the country's plantation and reforestation industry in the 1990s.
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