T

he government is revising a presidential regulation on greenhouse gas inventory in a bid to achieve unified, comprehensive and reliable data sets on greenhouse gases (GHG).

The Environment and Forestry Ministry said that the revision was needed because the current presidential regulation, No. 71/2011, did not include the guideline for the Integrated Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) system, which is mandatory under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

'€œMeanwhile, the MRV is the most important part [of climate change policy] because we have to verify our inventory process and mitigation attempts so that we can trace [the progress] and use it for international consultation, analysis and technical review.'€ the ministry'€™s director of GHG inventory and MRV, Kirsfianti L. Ginoga, told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

The MRV system is hoped to fix the country'€™s image of having unreliable climate change data, owing to poor data management, poor data access and conflicting data sets.

'€œThis is to avoid double counting so that we increase our costs and time efficiency,'€ Kirsfianti said.

For instance, the forestry ministry and now-defunct national agency for REDD+ (BP REDD+), had different Forest Reference Emission Levels (FREL) on account of definitional and methodological differences.

'€œTherefore, the revision of the presidential regulation will provide a comprehensive legal umbrella so that all [stakeholders] are aware of what the MRV system is, what the stages are, what the outputs will be and who will be held accountable,'€ said Kirsfianti, adding that the revision is hoped to be finished before the UN climate summit in Paris in December 2015.

Rizaldi Boer, director of the Centre for Climate Risk and Opportunity Management in Southeast Asia and Pacific (CCROM-SEAP), said that the revision should take into account the government'€™s new target for reducing carbon emissions by 29 percent by 2030, which goes beyond Indonesia'€™s 2009 agreement to slash emissions by 26 percent '€” or 41 percent with international assistance '€” by 2020.

'€œFurthermore, there'€™s a change in institution [in charge of managing climate change in Indonesia]. There was no climate change directorate general [in the Environment and Forestry Ministry], but now there is,'€ he told the Post on Tuesday. '€œTherefore, the regulation needs to be revised.'€

While the government declared support for the adoption of the MRV system in 2009 to ensure transparency when checking whether developing countries had met their pledge to slow the growth of emissions, progress had been going at a snail'€™s pace.

'€œWe'€™ve already implemented the MRV system but there'€™s no guideline yet and the scope is very limited. So far it has only been applied to the energy sector based on the national action plan in 2011 because it is easier to be measured.'€ Kirsfianti said.

But now, the government is well prepared to expand the system to all sectors, including land base.

'€œWe already have FREL, which can be used as a basis of performance. Then we have the Biennial Update Reports [BUR]. These are parts of a performance-based payment system in which countries may pay Indonesia for keeping carbon stock low,'€ said Kirsfianti.

Furthermore, the government has developed a monitoring system called the Indonesian National Carbon Accounting System (INCAS) to serve as the basis for the MRV system for the land sector.

INCAS is designed to bring together the best available spatial, biophysical and land management data from across the nation, to quantify changes in carbon stocks and greenhouse gas emissions in the agriculture, forestry and other land use sectors in Indonesia.