Aceh Governor Irwandi Yusuf, as the host, said that the meeting was a follow-up of a previous meeting held in California, the United States, that had produced no concrete results regarding a carbon trade mechanism that would be beneficial to local Acehnese.

“We do hope the meeting in Aceh will really be able to come up with the right formula so that local people can also benefit from forest preservation,” Irwandi said.

Other problems to be discussed and formulated during the meeting, Irwandi said, included the struggle to have the rights of local people over forests recognized both nationally and internationally as facilitated by the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) project.

“We will also talk about how carbon storage is calculated and what the REDD project needs to implement,” he said.

The Aceh provincial administration, Irwandi said, was committed to maintaining forests. As an initial step, he continued, his administration had been implementing a moratorium on illegal logging since
June 2007.

The GCF forum, he went on, was especially important for Aceh because it had been implementing the so-called Aceh Green program in a bid to help open up cooperation with national and international communities and restore the rights of local people to maintain and preserve forests in Aceh.

Deputy secretary for climate change and energy at the California Natural Resources Agency, Anthony Brunello, who represents California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, said that the GCF Taskforce Meeting 2010 was expected to produce standards and criteria that would be beneficial for local people.

He said he was looking forward to returning to California and sharing the results from the forum with all of the people of the state.

He said it was important for Californians to know about developments in the governors’ meeting.

He said his country had been running a program and developing various infrastructures to reduce carbon emissions. This was one reason, he said, why the US considered the forum an important part of their carbon trading  programs.

He pointed out the importance of the presence of delegations form Brazil, the US and Indonesia, each of which, he said, represented a different group of people participating in the preservation of forests.

Separately, GCF adviser and project leader William Boyd said that during the meeting the participating governors would share ideas and talk about their respective regions in a bid to find the right formula to maintain the environment globally.

The forum — the third of its kind — was preceded by forums held in Brazil and California.

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