The fight against global warming has received some unexpected supporters: Australia and the United States, the only two developed countries that have so far refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard has said his country will seek to guide some of the world's biggest polluters to a new consensus on tackling climate change at next week's Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Sydney.
Later in September, U.S. President George W. Bush will organize a gathering in Washington of the worlds' 15 biggest polluters, including the U.S., China and India, to find a common ground for a United Nations conference in Bali in December, that is expected to initiate talks on clinching a new deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012.
Although the two leaders remain critical of the Kyoto Protocol, at least they recognize the danger of climate change, and have agreed to send their delegations to the Bali meeting.
Their support for the Bali meet will add significance to the event. This provides a good opportunity for us to bring our case to the world; i.e. how to protect our remaining forests and peatlands, and rehabilitate damaged areas.
Few Indonesians realize we are already the third largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world after the U.S. and China.
According to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report issued last year, Indonesia emitted 2.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually, as compared to about 5 billion tons from China and 6 billion tons from the U.S.
Unlike China and the U.S., where much of their emissions come from the energy sector, much of Indonesia's greenhouse gases come from our soil, as a result of land use conversion.
We are converting our forests into plantations and our peatland into rice fields, such as the spectacular failure that was the one-million-hectare rice field project in Kalimantan under president Soeharto.
Deforestation has been a problem in Indonesia since Soeharto's rise to power in the late 1960s, when he started the exploitation of forest resources on a massive scale. After just a decade, forest resources emerged as the largest source of foreign exchange for the country after oil and gas.
But this exploitation comes with a price. According to some estimates, a total of 40 million hectares of our forests have disappeared in the past 30 years. Now our forests cover around 100 million hectares of land, as compared to over 140 million hectares in 1960s.
If Indonesia could stop deforestation, especially in peatland areas, it would contribute significantly to the world's efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses.
The problem is that there is no global mechanism in place that would compensate efforts in Indonesia and elsewhere to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation.
What exists is voluntarily assistance from concerned countries like Australia and Germany, which have extended grants to Indonesia to fight deforestation.
But on a global scale, the incentives are just not there yet. The Kyoto Protocol, the only available global arrangement to fight global warming, does not include reduced emissions from deforestation (RED) in its carbon trade regime, which allows companies in developed countries -- mainly in Japan and Europe -- to trade off business-related carbon emissions for emissions cuts achieved elsewhere.
Last year, the value of carbon credits reached $30 billion, representing a reduction of only 1.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Imagine if we could have traded our 2 billion tons of emissions from land use conversions; we would have pocketed about 40 billion.
As the host of the upcoming UN conference on climate change in Bali in December, we are in a better position to propose the inclusion of RED into any future arrangements beyond Kyoto.
All efforts must be mobilized to strengthen our position on RED so when it is tabled at the Bali meet, the RED proposal will already be ripe for adoption into the new global arrangement.
We could argue that by promoting RED into the global mechanism to fight global warming, we are not only protecting our forests and peatlands, but also helping broaden the menu of choices now available for countries.
The choices will no longer be limited to areas such as financing ""clean and green"" hydroelectric or wind power, but also financing reduced emissions from deforestation.
