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Can the government get behind Jokowi’s COP26 commitments?
The President has issued a bold statement that the environment and development are not mutually exclusive, but whether the government can fall in line with the global commitments he makes at COP 26 is another issue.
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Farmers use tractors on Sept. 4, 2021 to plow rice fields that are part of a planned food estate in Belanti village, Pujang Pisau regency, Central Kalimantan. (Antara/Makna Zaezar)
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t the UN climate conference (COP26) now underway in Glasgow, Scotland, more than 100 world leaders have put their names down for an ambitious global commitment to halt forest loss within the next decade. President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo is among them.
If Jokowi delivers on his promise, he will have sealed a remarkable transformation for Indonesia. For some time, the country has been one of the leading emitters of greenhouse gases in the world, largely because of the carbon released as its forests are cleared and its peatlands burn. Indonesia’s forest fires in 2015 released more carbon per day than the United States economy, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI).
In his speech at the conference, Jokowi positioned Indonesia as a nation on the right path, saying that its achievements were “beyond doubt” with forest fires down 82 percent and deforestation at its lowest level in two decades.
Some have disputed the accuracy and causes of these cited reductions, including BBC Indonesian’s fact-checking article on the President’s speech. It’s also easy to dismiss commitments as just hot air, as they’re promises about what they will do that, by definition, they haven’t done yet.
But there is good reason to question whether Indonesia is on a path to saving its rainforests, not least because Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar moved quickly to tweet that Indonesia had its own interpretation of “deforestation”. She also added that the country “must not stop the era of massive development in the name of carbon emissions” in an apparent repudiation of the commitment the President had just signed.
In an investigation by The Gecko Project and Tempo published last month, we revealed how the Defense Ministry was cutting down rainforests in Central Kalimantan to establish a 32,000-hectare cassava plantation. The development is part of the “food estate” program, an ambitious but vague plan Jokowi launched last year to scale up domestic food production.
Around 600 ha have been felled so far in just the first step of a vast plan, as Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto hopes to develop more than 1 million ha of cassava plantations across the country.
