Saving the Indonesian Forest

"When talking about climate-polluting CO2 emissions, everybody thinks of factories in Europe or power stations in the United States or the growing transport in countries like China and India," explains Christian Teriete from the World Wide Fund for Nature in South East Asia.

"But what most people don't know is that these forests in Indonesia or in other forest-heavy countries like Brazil or Congo matter a lot. Actually, 20 percent of annual CO2 emissions world-wide are made from deforestation in these forest-heavy countries," he adds.

Indonesia is willing to put a stop to the uncontrolled destruction of the rainforests. However, it wants the industrialised nations to pay compensation.

Farmers need land

Emil Salim, the chief negotiator of the Indonesian delegation in Bali, explains that Indonesia's farmers depend on land cultivation because there is no industry.

"What is land?" he asks. "Land is under the trees in the forest." He says farmers need an incentive to preserve the forests because it is not that they don't like the forest but that they need the land because "it's all about how to survive."

Indonesia currently has 90 million hectares of rainforest. But environment campaigners estimate that three football fields worth of forest are lost every minute.

On Borneo alone, over 60 percent of tropical rainforest has been damaged by illegal logging and the development of palm oil plantations, which is being driven by European demand.

"When there's a demand, the price goes up and that stimulates the production on this side," Salim explains. "Ten years ago, the European Union did not have this biofuel. But suddenly biofuel has become so attractive that it is boosting exports."

Spatial planning crucial

Salim also says that spatial planning is crucial. Forests have to be divided into "protective forests, national parks, conservation forests, production forests and conservation forests".

For the Indonesian government, the future is REDD -- "Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation". Last week, the government launched a REDD scheme, which is supposed to generate up to two million US dollars a year by selling carbon stored in the tropical forests. But some say the REDD scheme will deprive indigenous people living in the forests of their rights to the land.

Indonesia also wants REDD to be incorporated into the post-Kyoto Protocol deal to combat climate change. Whether industrial nations will agree to put forward the money for preserving the world's rainforests is proving to be one of the major stumbling blocks at the Bali conference.