Description of the project:

The focus of this report is the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), which was formed in 2004 to promote the use of sustainable palm. RSPO members account for around 40 per cent of global palm oil production.

In late 2009, Indonesia made a voluntary commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 per cent by 2020, or by 41 per cent with international assistance, compared to business as usual. The country aims to achieve 87 per cent of this goal by reducing emissions from deforestation and peatland conversion. In a step towards achieving these emission reductions, a decree was signed in 2011 putting into effect a two-year moratorium on issuing new permits for use of primary natural forest and peatland.

This report estimates and maps the impacts that alternative national and subnational economic incentive structures for reducing emissions from deforestation (REDD+) in Indonesia would have had on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and national and local revenue if they had been in place from 2000 to 2005. Different scenarios have been constructed, using policy improvement measures, to explore reduction of GHG emissions and at the same time generate a programmatic budget surplus.

This report estimates and maps the impacts that alternative national and sub national economic incentive structures for reducing emissions from deforestation (REDD+) in Indonesia would have had on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and national and local revenue had they been in place from 2000 to 2005. Policy improvement measures have been used to construct various scenarios to simultaneously explore reduction of GHG emissions and generate a programmatic budget surplus.

This letter presents a hybrid approach for quantifying the extent and change of primary forest in Sumatra. It includes primary intact and primary degraded classes using a per-pixel supervised classification mapping followed by a Geographic Information System (GIS)-based fragmentation analysis. Loss of Sumatra's primary intact and primary degraded forests was estimated to provide suitable information for the objectives of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD and REDD+) program.

Destruction of the rainforest and other tropical forests continue on a dramatic scale in spite of unprecedented global attention to the issue of deforestation and the role of forests in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. The global figures for deforestation are contested: Two main sources of data, the FAO’s Global Forest Resources Assessment (2010) and a remote sensing study by University of Maryland (2013), use different technologies and definitions of forest and display huge variation between figures.