Bright Lights, Big Trees.
I hate flying, especially for twenty hours, as is the case when travelling by plane from New York City to Jakarta. Not only did I have to contend with my usual sweaty palms and stiff knees but also a few bumps and twists while traveling through some storm clouds that were coasting over the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand. The rain falling from these same clouds has been responsible for over 130 deaths in southern China. As the plane descended into Jakarta, though, these deadly forms seemed more auspicious than ominous – the setting sun shot bright pink and orange hues through the thunderclouds, transforming their dark grays and near blacks into an explosion of color.
Emerging from the airport, I passed by a crowd of taxi drivers seemingly uninterested in seizing fares from arriving passengers like myself. All eyes were on a television. It’s the World Cup after all. Everything else can wait.
I haven’t been to Asia before but there’s a lot that’s already familiar to me here. Over 80% of Indonesia’s population is Muslim, making it the country with the largest Muslim population in the world. Having travelled throughout the Middle East over the past several years, the sounds of Koranic recitations drifting from cabs or the site of dozens of children lingering in front of a madrasah ibtada’iyyah in the afternoon remind me of previous reporting trips to Iraq, the West Bank, and Syria. This time, though, I’m not seeking out war, occupation, or refugees, but trees.
It might come as a surprise but Indonesia is the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the heat trapping particles that are causing global warming. Indonesia’s big problem isn’t coal-fired power plants or the large number of automobiles chocking its streets (although those are certainly contributors), like in the U.S. or China. It’s deforestation. Over 80% of Indonesia’s greenhouse gas emissions are caused by the clearing of its vast swaths of forests or the draining of its peatlands. Timber. Paper pulp. Palm oil. It’s a classic resource curse. Forests are destroyed, habitats wiped-out, indigenous communities destroyed. And the money made from this destruction flows out of the country, enriching a small group of government officials on its way to financial capitals around the world. And it also pumps a lot of carbon into the atmosphere.
But there’s a newfangled problem in Indonesia. Banks, such as Merrill Lynch, are investing in projects that are meant to generate carbon credits, which are traded like any other speculative commodity. That’s right: rather than cutting down the trees for profit, banks are speculating on the carbon they store when they are not cut down. Governments like Norway are funding projects, too. It’s a type of government green-washing: Norway takes a bit of money from its oil and natural gas industries, gives it Indonesia to preserve forests, and in the process becomes the state equivalent of Virgin Air – pumping massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere by way of fossil fuels but “offsetting” the damage, or at least managing how the public views them.
There’s promise in these schemes though. Not the market-based, Merrill Lynch type, but rather the state-funded model. If Norway and other rich countries can provide funding to the Indonesia government to halt deforestation then there could be a huge decline in global greenhouse gas emissions. Tackling fossil fuel extraction will remain a necessity but forcing rich countries to pony-up money to keep forests standing might be a workable model. Of course it continues to commodify trees. And there are those here who are opposed to continuing that practice.
Over the next week and a half I’ll be taking a look at how these schemes work – and what forest communities have to say about them.
