 Hello everyone and thank you for joining us. My name is Emeline Cheney, I'll be your moderator today. I'm the Regional Advisor on Forest and Climate Change at UN Environment. We have an exciting line map of experts from C4, FAO, UNDP, UN Environment and Indonesia's Ministry of Environment and Forestry here with us today. Each of these experts will give a short presentation and then we'll open the floor for questions from you all. For your information, the webinar will also be recorded so you can review and share it afterwards. And we also encourage you to live tweet or share your thoughts on social media using the hashtag Pete Lens Matter and Forests Matter or tagging C4 or UN Red. Today's topic is on Pete Lens Indonesia and their link to Red Cross and Climate Change mitigation. We will examine why the conservation and restoration of Pete Lens is so crucial from a scientific, environmental, economic and livelihoods point of view and we'll also discuss potential solutions for protecting Pete Lens and preventing their loss in the future. This topic is timely other than ever. I'm sure you will have seen in the news that due to the extreme dry season and despite substantial efforts from the government of Indonesia, the forest and pit fires are back. As of this August, the government has declared a state of emergency in the provinces of Riau, South Sumatra, West Kalimantan, Jambi, South Kalimantan and Central Kalimantan where extensive Pete Lens are particularly prone to fires. And our first speaker today will address the science behind why Pete Lens are so flammable. But let me start off by giving you a quick idea of the link between Red Cross, Indonesia and Pete Lens. So what is Red Cross? It's an acronym and it stands for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. It is a framework under the International Paris Agreement on Climate Change under which developing countries can receive payments for protecting their forests as a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Most tropical Pete Lens are forested and they store significant amounts of carbon, about 20 times as much as other types of soil. So the destruction of degradation of forest cover on Pete Lens delivers a double blow of carbon emissions. One from losses, with losses from both the standing biomass trees but also losses from the drying and degradation of pit soils. Indonesia is a key country for Red Cross. It has the third largest area of tropical forest globally. And it's also home to about half of the world's tropical Pete Lens. This past February, Norway announced that it would provide the first result-based payments to Indonesia as part of a Replus Agreement that was signed between the two nations in 2010. This international recognition of Indonesia's efforts in reducing deforestation was really well-merited. Primary forest loss dropped by 60% in 2017 compared to 2016. And the government is planning to continue with this trend and has committed to reducing its emissions by 29% by 2030. This goal, however, will be difficult to attain if forest and pit fires continue to spike every few years. Hence our discussion today. To give you a better picture, emissions from the 2015 fire season in Indonesia have on some days exceeded the average daily emission of the United States. So with that quick background in mind, I will turn over to Johan Kift, lead technical advisor for the UN Red Programme in Indonesia. And his presentation is on fire, the challenge to sustainable management of tropical Pete Lens. Over to you, Johan. Okay, Emilina, thank you very much for your introduction. And my presentation will be about fire. And I have to underline that fire is a key challenge to sustainable management of Pete Lens, both in the tropics as well as in temperate regions of the world. Fire have been common as well in the past in North Western Europe, actually up to the time that even the city of Vienna in 1928 was blanketed with haze, the same as now Singapore's experiences. So as such, this is not a new problem, but it is a problem where I think we have to deal with. Because as we all know and as we all are aware of, fires is creating substantial damage to the economies and as well to the livelihoods and the health of people in Southeast Asia. And as you can see, the impact of fires is both in terms of environment economy and health are significant. We talked in 2015 about 2.6 million hectares burned about an impact on the economy of 16.1 billion dollars, particularly to haze, disturbed transport, trade and tourism. And also in terms of fiscal expenditures towards fire suppression and mobilization of military and police troops to put fires out. The health impacts are significant. The most of these impacts for the people who are suffering from it are EDI, first of all, so that people will feel the impact throughout their lives. And as such, in a cross-cooperation with the Government of Indonesia, we have established the so-called desired state, which we aim that actually we move towards a minimum or as possible as the targets of the government is share of wildfires, ideally by next year or at least by 2025. And that means that we have to restore peak lands, we have health development and drainage of peak lands, we prevent these folks from fires and management, and we need to look at community and we need to engage communities in those efforts to community-based fire prevention and they move towards and so what's called an integrated fire management approach, which brings all these elements together. And that means that we have to create capacity to deal with fires across the landscape and engage all land uses as much as possible. And now I will now explain why are fire pit fires so bad. As Emily explained in the reintroduction, is that you talk about you have fuel in the soil, which in normal fires you don't have. You have mineral soils, mineral soils don't work, but the pit fire is peak consist of carbon, of actually of forest materials preserved on the water, which if drained are then getting exposed to fire. And that means as soon as you get a fire in the surface, on the surface, in the surface in the surface vegetation, then it will lead to actually the fall over of trees. This means that the trees start falling over and then start burning. And that will create, and as we have talked about here, about 150 tons of biomass per hectares, that will then create actually a layer of fuel covering the peat soil. Okay, next slide. And as these vertical trees now are laying on the peat soil, then the sub-surface peat soil that starts to burn and then gradually the fire starts moving into the peat. So the fires are moving into the peat, so it submerges into the soil. Okay, and then it starts burning into the soil and that creates substantial greenhouse gas emissions and as well it creates that effectively the peat disappears, the peat disappears, so the land surface comes down. So, and by coming the land surface is down and the fire intensifiers ultimately, the peat fires ultimately create substantial carbon dioxide emissions, just fuel and accelerating global warming and as explained in the introduction, up to a level of the same level as the overall emissions of the United States as a whole on a daily basis. Okay. And then moving into the water and then burning in and then keeping that sub-surface peat contains large amounts of biofuel up to over 1,000 ton per hectare or more and then so it's currently starting burning into and that creates the land where the land subsides, the holes created by the fires after the next slide. After they created the gaps, then after the rainy season starts, these gaps are filled with water and because of the water reaches the underlying acid surface layer of the peat which then turn the land and water acid. So the fire goes out, the fire disappears, but after the fire disappears often the real problems start because you will end up with a landscape in very high acidity levels which makes, for example, plant regrowth and others more difficult and creates effectively the former tropical forest effectively into a, effectively baselands. And that is why we are now working together with the government towards an integrated five-manus of pros which includes actually three elements, increase the readiness so have the systems and the warnings in place and the capacity in villages so that communities can, if informed by cell phones and so can act upon, can act upon a fire warning and put catfires out before they spread into the peat. And then that is the readiness and that requires the response capacity because the capacity includes the systems so that we have through what's called incident command system which means that we can feel that there are people trained as incident commanders. We can have the ability to call in airplanes and to call in all kinds of support to make sure the fire doesn't spread and after then the fire is put out then we work towards recovery of the landscape through a process like rewetting and peat-rewetting, peat restoration, restoration of vegetation and so on. And at the same time ensuring that the risk levels within the peat landscapes are being reduced and by doing so ultimately avoiding future fire events like as in 2019, 2015 and as we hope now this year we already have been able to have some impact and we've been able to reduce fire risk and we hope to accelerate a trend in the future. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you, Johan. We will hold questions until the end when we open up the floor. So I now would like to turn to Daniel Modiasso who is principal scientist at CIFOR who will be explaining why peatlands are such unique and fragile ecosystems. His topic is titled Where have all the tropical peat forests gone? Daniel, over to you. Thank you, Malin. Well, the big question is again where they've gone and why peatlands or tropical peatland matter in the battle of climate change. So, peat swarm forests is a very unique ecosystem in the tropics because they serve a lot of ecosystem surfaces that you can expect including mainly storing huge amount of carbon in this ecosystem and they are kept and preserved there because the ecosystem is kept wet so when you have peatland and it's getting dry that's the beginning of the problem. So it's very important to have peatland always wet in order to keep the organic material which are potential to be emitted when it is dry to be there. So when the conversion is taking place deforestation is taking place degradation of tropical peat swarm forests is taking place they usually follow by developing or establishing drainage canal in order to have the converted peatland to be manageable. So draining is one thing in the tropical peatland landscape and usually in order to make the land more arable to remove the biomass people put fire and that can happen very fast. So those carbon stored in many years will be released in relatively quick period and if your peat is wet then you will end up with smoldering fire you have smoke, a lot of smoke and haze that will cause a lot of problem in terms of health and also feasibility in the air traffic etc. But if the peat is dry when the canal is established very likely one will end up with blazing fire like the picture in the bottom. So in order to look at how the tropical peatland can be very crucial and significant in combating climate change we try to look at the amount of carbon release back in 2015 we went out during that big fire during the month of September and October we did measure what happened and what is there in the haze. What we call fire emission factor was started to be quantified and we were impressed and amazed to see that every single kilogram of dry peatland it will release about one and a half kilogram of carbon dioxide. So imagine if you hold such a small amount this, you know, kilograms of carbon dioxide so if you imagine the size of peat burn and the depth of peat burn that can be a lot. And in this particular period in Central Kalimantan we measured during those two months of September, October 2015 every day around 11 million tons of carbon dioxide was emitted. So that's a large amount. Just to give you comparison or perspective that amount is larger than daily emission of the entire EU countries, 28 countries daily emission is about 8.9, almost 10 but that fire in Central Kalimantan was 11.3 million tons a day. So that's the scale of disaster when fire is taking place. So why then it matters in terms of combating against climate change. Again, we did measure the amount of carbon stored there. This is an example of deep peatland with a depth of around 5 to 6 and many places we also can find 16 meters depth of peat. The amount of carbon stored in every hectare is about 1500 tons. So that's about 5 times higher than pristine tropical forests in every hectare. So that's the potential of peatland if it is conserved to be able to mitigate climate change. A lot bigger, the potential is a lot bigger than tropical forests itself. Because as you can see in the graph the dark area is the amount of carbon underneath in the soil, in the peat which is about 80% compared to the amount of the carbon in the forest. So even if tropical peat-some forest is removed we still have a large amount, large portion of carbon underneath. So again, if it is kept there and wet tropical peatland can be a potential solution for climate change. If you look at this landscape it's a contrast between degraded peat-some forests in the foreground, it's very light green and it's very secondary, not necessarily pristine. It's been disturbed but quite dark in the back. So one good thing about combining mitigation and adaptation in this kind of situation because it can get burned very easily. You can see in the foreground is the canal and there's trading canal suddenly if it is blocked you can put the water table back so that the soil can be moist enough to help the vegetation to grow when it is introduced and also at the same time reduce the emission because oxidation is avoided. So blocking the canal is one thing and then reintroducing tropical peatland species is another one. So restoring peatland can consider that in terms of adapting with the changing climate and at the same time also avoiding fire and also reducing emission. So all these tropical forests are already disturbed and affected by human intervention. A lot has been converted and we are sure that this ecosystem, newly established ecosystem will keep emitting. Be it acacia, plantation, oil palm or crop lands, they are still emitting. So we try to look at this in order to quantify again the emission factor and this is very important for monitoring when you are talking about introducing for example a red project. So one need to have the so-called emission factor in the left-hand side you can see the emission factors for various land uses including the highest one here is acacia plantation followed by crop lands and oil palm. So somewhere around 70 ton per hectare emission that's happening in acacia plantation. On the right-hand side this is different presentation. This is a lifetime or life cycle of crops and trees. We use this 25 years. The amount of emission is quantified there as ecosystem. Again we need to monitor this in order to report what's going to happen if you implement project in a converted pit land or compare with pristine and conserved pit land. So we need to monitor this especially land use chains and emission factor with regard to disturbing and tropical forests. Thank you. Thank you very much Daniel. So indeed I now turn to Adam Gerand who is acting FAO representative in Indonesia. His topic is titled monitoring pit lands for climate impacts and benefits using ground soil. I've never wondered how you actually measure emissions stored in pit land. You'll want to tune in for that one. Adam. Thank you Emily and Daniel for that introduction. Hello colleagues here at C4 and online participants. My name is Adam Gerand from the UN food and agriculture organization. I'm going to talk about climate impacts and how we can monitor them better. We need to monitor them better. So I'm going to be talking about that with a particular emphasis on climate impacts. Next slide. So historically pit lands have mostly been avoided by people. They've either been ignored or at worst abused or degraded. So I'm going to talk about that with a particular emphasis. It's really pleasing that the Indonesian government has now got a policy of pit restoration. What they're calling three hours. This is rewetting, re-vegetation and revitalization that Daniel mentioned. Those things are really important. But we still have some challenges in pit lands. They're difficult to access, the conditions inside the pit lands it's hard to do monitoring inside pit lands and it also means that we've got poor management inside the pit lands. There's weak enforcement. These are difficult areas to operate in. So we understand a little bit about why we want to monitor pit lands for these rewetting and raising of the water tables. We want to re-vegetate those areas and we want to create alternative livelihoods for the people that are living there. So we need to think about what we need to measure and to monitor them. One of the most important things from a carbon point of view is the biomass. That is not only the biomass in the trees above the ground but as we've heard from Daniel there's a lot of carbon in the pit land soil and we've also heard from Johan that that can actually burn when the pit land gets dry enough. So we need to monitor the groundwater level. That's the depth or the distance below the surface of the pit where the water goes down when the canals are put in and the pit lands are drained. When that happens progressively there is this oxidation or the loss of pit lands particularly made worse when the pit lands are burnt and you can get subsidence from the pit lands that is effectively greenhouse gas going into the atmosphere. So we need to be measuring all of those things. The groundwater level, the subsidence the greenhouse gases and ultimately if it gets significant subsidence or loss of pit land if it's near the coast you can have inundation with water and that can actually lead to potential large loss of land. So this is a very important thing to be monitoring. We also want to be monitoring livelihood and economic information. I'm not going to talk about that today. I'm going to focus on the biophysical things for climate change. One of the most obvious we can do is vegetation cover changing land use, deforestation can be measured and monitored through satellites. Many people have seen pictures of that. We can also do fire hotspots. Fires show up very well in satellites and we can and there is an active program of measuring those things in Indonesia. In addition we can do much better at being able to do some other things with satellite data. Soil moisture data can actually be estimated by special satellites with radar data so that we can now get better estimates across the pit lands without actually having to go there. Next slide. So there are two basic ways and I want to talk a bit about the advantages and disadvantages of how to measure pit lands. The first of which is field data collection and the second one is remote sensing. Historically field data has been the primary way of collecting pit land data. That used to mean going out to the field and measuring it manually. You can see people walking around here in pit swamps in this small picture. It's not easy work. Increasingly we're putting automatic sensors into pit lands to measure things like ground border level, to measure greenhouse gases and to measure excitants. Those things are being done increasing with automated machines but most often it still has to have people going there in the field to do difficult pit land work, research work. This is hard, wet, dirty work. It's slow and expensive and in the end you only cover a very small area so it's got its limitations. That's where the remote sensing comes in because with satellites aircrafts, drones, you can cover large areas very fast. We're getting much better satellites with increased resolution. Even LiDAR lasers are being used to measure pit lands. We can get very detailed maps now and particularly they can give us consistent time series of maps that can show changes, really monitoring the pit in near real time. Increasingly this data is very cost effective because agencies are making it free. Of course the cost of the satellite is expensive but those satellites are being built for many purposes to monitor the world and the data is increasingly available free. Free data is not the only thing. You still need to access that data which is complicated. You need to process it with big computers and that requires skilled staff. But let me show you when you get all that data together some of the information you can put also on the web to make that more available to the public and to managers. This is an example of Indonesia's pit lands monitoring system called PRIMS, pit restoration information monitoring system and it's showing an area of Southern Kalamantan that has got huge areas of pit land in green. If we go through this, I'll also show you on the next slide you can see the extensive areas of canals that have been put in across those pit lands. All of those canals are causing pit degradation, greenhouse gases, drying of the pit and making them more susceptible to fires. With systems like this, people are now much more aware of how extensive those canals are and what a huge area of degraded pit lands we're dealing with. This helps the managers make better decisions and understand where to do the actions that they need to do to restore the pit lands. If we zoom in and have a look at one of those sites, I'm just showing you there, we'll zoom right in and have a look at what has been done in some of those pit lands. This map shows backfilling that is filling in of pit lands in the blue dots in a canal system there on the right side of the vertical line. Those areas have been filled to fill up the pit lands, to stop them draining, fill up the canal, stop the pit lands draining. In the background, the layer of pink and blue is showing some of the satellite data that is giving an indication of the changes in soil moisture between 2016 and 2018. You can see on the right hand side of that chart the areas where they've been filled, the areas are bluer. On the left hand side it is pink and red, so we're still getting negative drier pit lands. So we're seeing this as being a way to monitor pit lands, the restoration of pit lands using satellites. So the blue areas have positive change in soil moisture index, which is very promising. Last slide please. So in conclusion, pit lands have huge potential. They have impacts on climate change, but they also have promise for restoring and absorbing more carbon. There are two basic methods for pit land measurement, field measurements and remote sensing. I've indicated or hinted at some of the rapid improvements in pit land monitoring and how we're able to get better monitoring data from automated groundwater levels, new satellites, high resolution and even products like soil moisture. All of this is leading us to faster, cheaper large area pit land monitoring. This is very positive. But I still want to reinforce that we've got many challenges remaining to be resolved. Pit lands are still mostly undervalued, underresourced and poorly managed. We need to build the research and the capacity development to manage those pit lands better. But I want to end on a positive note. I think there's increasing recognition of climate change links, the urgency, political will. There's increasingly here in Indonesia, particularly research being done on pit lands. The International Tropical Pit Land Centre is being set up here in C4 in collaboration with the government with strong ministerial support. We're getting globally collaboration through the Global Pit Lands Initiative between different countries. So hopefully we will learn the lessons of how to manage our pit lands. I think for future, for pit lands, the future is promising. Thank you. Thank you, Adam. Thank you very much. All right. So let me now turn to Abdul Wahid Sitomarang, who is Senior Advisor for Natural Resources Governance at UNDP Indonesia. He's going to tell us about innovative financing for pit lands restoration and protection. Thank you, Emeline and colleagues and online participants. As said by the previous speakers, it is very important to manage the pit land and also to undertake pit restorations. Well, in order to realize that it requires a sufficient budget, budget is very important to undertake those objectives. As you may know, the government already set our target to restore the degraded pit land up to 2020 is about 2.4 million hectares. So this is the priority and if it is restored, it will also create significant impact to other pit land areas. So this is the most priority. So I just want to give you a sense, in order to restore 2.4 million hectares, there is a budget exercise done by the pit land restoration agency. It requires about 10 trillion rupees or it is similar or it is equivalent to $779 million. So it is quite expensive and that budget alone will not be sufficient to cover this budget. Therefore we need to explore other financing mechanisms to meet the targets. There are several financing mechanisms that we can explore in addition to state budget. So I just want to highlight a few of them and then we can explore further through question and answer. So the first one is there is a potential to mobilize resources from Islamic financing community. The framework is already set up under the Ministry of Finance, they call it Green Sukuk. Under the Green Sukuk it is very possible to use the money to do the pit restoration and pit conservation. So this is one source that the government can explore. The second option is through ecological fiscal transfer. If you are familiar with environmental fiscal transfer instruments at least there are two that we are very familiar with. The first one is general budget allocation. The second one is specific budget allocation. For specific budget allocation it is kind of this incentive mechanism. The poorer you are, the more you will get transfer from the central government. But there is also another fiscal transfer and this is very innovative that the government of Indonesia has they call it investment fund. In this, if the province government has a good initiative to protect the pit land or do innovative things to restore the pit land then they can have the investment fund. It is a positive incentive mechanism. The issue is it is not yet included in the criteria to get the investment fund now. So it is very important to encourage the central government to also include pit land restoration and pit land conservation. One of the indicators for the province to get the investment fund. Of course, private responsibility is very important and the Ministry of Environmental Policy can tell more how private responsibility is also a game changer to do this. Payment for environmental services and polluter pay mechanisms can also contribute significantly to mobilize resources to restore the pit land. In the conclusion I just want to highlight that resources are very important and that budget alone cannot cover all to do it and therefore we need to explore other mechanisms to meet the targets. That's all. Thank you, Chuck. Finally, our last speaker of the day is Mr. Jati Wichaksono Adi Chief of Public Relations Bureau at the Ministry of Environment and Forestry in Indonesia. Mr. Jati will offer some final closing remarks including a video on the remarkable biodiversity of Indonesia. Please, Mr. Jati. Hello, good afternoon. Prof. Daniel, Mr. Johan, Mr. Wichak and Emeline and Adam. Hi. On behalf of Ministry of Forestry and Environment and Forestry, hello. Indonesian has committed a commitment in Indonesia. I can say to the Indonesian has ratified under the law number 16 at 2016 to ensure our commitment for sustainable forest and pit management and to reduce carbon emission under IDD Plus scheme. And Indonesia has put in place IDD Plus infrastructure consists of IDD National Strategy, FRAIL, NFMH and SIF Guard Information System Plus Monitoring, Reporting and Verification System. And today we are on the finalised step to the making result of the base payment reality. And Indonesia has established and well-run the National Strategy System on Climate Change called an SCC to gather information on all IDD Plus related activities on climate change, mitigation and adaptation. The data is represented to ensure transparency and easy to understand by multi-stakeholder. And in progress, annual emission reduction from forest and pit during the period of 2002-2060 is 709 100 Giga CO2 equivalent if the emission from the pit fire is taken out the average rate would be 466 035 Giga Giga Tone Giga Tone CO2 equivalent which contributes from the composition of annual rate of 305, 304, 377 Giga Tone CO2 equivalent. The significant improvement made a fire mitigation and response compared to 2060 emission reduction from pit fire has significant drop from to 712,000 Giga Tone to 2015 to 90,000 Giga Tone CO2 equivalent. And in 2017 pit fire emission is on average 12,000 Giga Tone CO2 equivalent. The government has issued ministerial decree to protect and manage pit ecosystem in 2040 with further revise in 2060 maybe empathy emphasized on the pit function carbon storage and to conserve biodiversity. And new paradigm social forestry a flagship program in ensure to the community active partnership on sustainable forest management. The social forestry is to make sure to the forest management unit or KAPEHA in our future FMU or forest management unit now as KAPEHA, Satuan Pengolaan Hutan which have three type for KAPEP forest production for KAPEHAL protection forest and KAPEHAK for conservation forest. And public private partnership through the various means one of them is engaging private sector as restoration ecosystem partners and media as co-partner in ensuring public engagement and taken into consideration on all ministry of environment and forestry program. I think enough. Thank you. Emily? Thank you. I understand you have a video the ministry has made that you would like to be shown so I will ask our colleagues to show the video now. Indonesia is one of the largest archipelagic countries in the world with more than 17,000 islands that spread over an area of more than 2 million kilometers squares Indonesia is host to several unique ecosystems containing a large number of diverse species at least 10% of the world's flowering species which counts to over 25,000 species flourish in Indonesia there are also 12% of the world's mammals 16% of reptiles 17% of birds 6% of amphibians and over 45% of fishes all of which are parts of the nation slash biodiversity in order to preserve its biodiversity which also contributes hugely to the world Indonesia has taken significant steps in accordance to the national and global target on biodiversity framework the government has allocated more than 500 units of protected areas spread throughout the country with the total coverage area of 22 million hectares terrestrial and 20 million marine protected area because of its uniqueness and universal values these areas are recognized as World Heritage Sites 16 Biosphere Reserves 7 Ramsor Sites and 7 ASEAN Heritage Sites many studies and researches has also been conducted to identify plants and animals to assess their potential uses for medicine, food energy and bio control for chemical hazard some community driven activities such as ecotourism has also contributed to the effort to preserve Indonesia's biodiversity which also encouraged cooperation among local stakeholders the results are heartening by 2019 Indonesia has been able to increase the population of endemic and priority species communities have also enjoyed benefits from this improved environment through ecotourism environmental services and other significant condition which contribute to their quality of life as a whole there is little doubt that Indonesia's vast biodiversity plays a hugely significant role in reducing the impacts of climate change by preserving its biodiversity and its ecosystems Indonesia can help support the entire planet's sustainability and ensure a better future for all humankind thank you very much okay with this I'd like to thank you all for your presentations and also thank everyone for their kind attention we will now open the floor to questions starting with those in the audience in the C4 offices for those joining us online I'll be asking you in a few minutes to type your questions in the chat box and I'll pick up the questions from there and if you could please indicate who you're addressing the question to that would be useful and on that note I also wanted to indicate that we have another expert in the audience Yves Le Monnier who is C4 senior scientist specializing ecology and mapping so if you have questions in particular on the mapping related to the fire pitlands or red plants in general you can also send your question to him okay over to those in C4 to pick up a couple of questions maybe we'll take two questions from the audience please well I have a question for you when you list down the potential financial scheme what are the most accessible and already been implemented so far with regard to climate change from the list you had including Sukuk and other things well thank you for Daniel for your questions and I will also answer questions from Jan Peters the question is are there any thoughts about using carbon credit schemes or financing so from Daniel among the financing mechanisms private responsibility is has been implemented because there is a request from the government from the Ministry of Environment for private sector to also undertake the business research in their constitutional area so private responsibility concrete question is which one is accessible and who is using that well well if I may answer Islamic financing is the most accessible Islamic financing is the most accessible because the framework is already there and the government is issuing Sukuk every year well it is up to Ministry whether they want to use Sukuk or not to finance the business research so there is nobody using it so far so for pit restorations it's not yet for pit restorations it's not yet but for conservation for national park they already access that who is using it Ministry of Environment Ministry already use the Sukuk I was thinking of private sector or something like that no this is the sovereign Sukuk it is not private Sukuk it is also possible for private sector to issue Sukuk to finance their activity to restore the pit areas so it is possible okay thank you very much I see that questions are already piling up in the question box thank you so much I'm taking note of all of them just before we get to them I'll now pick a question from the audience great thanks so much for the fantastic webinar I'm Amy Dushala scientist here at C4 and I just have a question actually for the two people sitting in the room here who are focusing a little bit more on the research and monitoring side and I'm just wondering given a bit of the crisis state of peatland conservation, the fires that are happening now if you had an unlimited amount of funds where would you target those funds in terms of critical peatland research and critical monitoring research if we follow the pattern that BRG for example is using the triple R I think the third R would be the most immediate and impactful way to do that's the revitalization of the local livelihood including alternative of livelihood that would be straightforward and measurable in terms of avoiding further deforestation and degradation on draining peatland and also this will have a long-term impact if one can really demonstrate the result of the intervention from thanks for the question Amy from my side I think in terms of the topics I support Daniel's view on the socio-economic side that's very much needed we do need to provide an alternative livelihood for the people living and working around the peatlands those are the people that are using fire for their own subsistence livelihoods in many cases and we need to help them change their practices by giving them an alternative but I think we need to be doing more than just one thing we need to be doing multiple things so at the same time as doing those programs if we had unlimited funds the activities like rewetting the active work that's being done on that is really important and we should be doing that at the same time as helping people move away from those practices the damaging practices blocking the canals and filling them up and getting water into those peatlands is one of the most important things we can do to stop the fires in terms of places to where to do it it's clear to me that Indonesia is the hotspot globally it's also the place where there is most political will most interest and focus so it's clearly a good place to start we also should be looking at other countries before they make these same kind of past practices and open up their peatlands to realize how difficult it is and we've been doing that through the global peatlands initiative by bringing other countries here so sharing the lessons learned and experiences and Indonesia and the Minister of Environment and Forest herself is very keen on that sharing that information with other countries to avoid bad practices occurring on other peatlands elsewhere thanks thank you on the note we have a question from Lok Sapkota which would be well answered by Johan and Mr Jati the question is in light of climate change is there any temporal change in terms of seasonal change in peatland fire are there any spatial patterns of peatland fire in relation to management social forestry was mentioned as an approach and this person is interested so if there has been a difference in dealing with peatfire so Johan would you like to answer that question yeah of course I can thank you for your question and yeah I think we have to underline that even in Southeast Asia it is of course mainly Indonesia problem but recently saw substantial peatland fires in southern Thailand and this shows as well the sensitivity and indeed by clearing peat from forest you create changes in the microclimates which will lead to more to more to more to drier conditions to drier conditions and thus nearly a dry out of the topsoil and thus given that the topsoil consist mainly of organic forest materials thus higher chances in more chance of fires so in nature if you look at natural circumstances you don't see now there are expectations but you don't hardly see fires in intact tropical in intact tropical primary peat forest so as soon as you remove the forest cover you initiate the process of also beside global climate change also of local microclimate changes which will indeed lead to more to more chances in forest and that will also follow a special distribution of fires Thank you Mr. Jati since you mentioned social forestry in your presentation would you like to add something sorry you are on mute On social forestry until now ministry environment and forestry has issued certificate for 3 million hectares for surrounding people from forest in Indonesia community in on surrounding the forest and the team in ministry of forestry has prepared to the social forestry make a more until 5 million 5 million in end of 2019 yeah yeah and all community in surrounding forest will be responsible for the forest fire inside the community fire brigade or self support to the forest fire combating yeah yes and Manggala Agni is under control for the climate change should be stand by in the side by side for the control with health sport monitoring of vulnerable area on seven province in Indonesia yeah yeah thank you very much mr jetty okay another question we received from our colleagues of the recocked center for forest and forest sorry they are interested in learning about the integrated management of between landscapes and and you know recognizing that there is competition competing demands for water they like to learn more about how to develop and implement between landscape management biodiversity and livelihood development so if any of the panelists have experiences of how to bring together water forestry irrigation fishery water transportation and to design landscape management plans so who could take this this question Johan go ahead okay thanks the governance of peak land particularly the water is essential and if you look at traditional practices also here in Indonesia like for example the handle Central Kalimantan example of how already communities have dealt with sustainable management of peak lands and I think in that perspective it's now that the Indonesia government is moving towards peak hydro systems and that is actually an important step towards more landscape based management of peak lands however that will as well more active engagement by land uses like you see for example in these handles where actually land uses associate themselves and collaborate on land use and also on maintenance of water infrastructure like you say now has to happen at a larger scale at KG levels and that's why we're currently working with Indonesia Coordinated Ministry of Economic Affairs and with the Ministry of Environment and Forestry to look at models to apply in Indonesia and as part of that we have facilitated a study trip to the Netherlands for the Ministry of Environment and Forestry to look there at so called water boards or water scuffs which are based around similar principles and we're now looking at in a sense applying that at a larger scale the cost of so because that will require substantial build of human capital in terms of capacity or deal with this because we have to admit that the like in the current situation where peak lands are used and the argument in peak lands parts of forest parts of forest lands, parts of the forest estate and so on but then we have to use the ecological most relevant boundaries which are defined by hydrology so we need to build covenants systems around these and that's currently we are working on as human environment and cost cooperation with the Indonesian Coordinated Ministry of Environment and Forestry partners with partners like the FLU and the PC4 and like Wageningen First University Research Centre and with Kimita thank you Thank you Johan so we also have an interesting question on financing from Jan Peters and actually he could buy at Belief Recoft as well they are wondering whether there are any sorts that using carbon credit schemes for financing peak land re-wetting you want to take that one Thank you Emily and thank you for the questions whether it is possible using carbon credit schemes I will put in the carbon credit schemes under payment for environmental services as an umbrella of these mechanisms yes it is yes it is possible yes it is possible and if we look at the green climate fund it is very possible for country to access these mechanisms for carbon credit schemes and this is for the multilateral mechanism for the voluntary and bilateral mechanisms if we look at Indonesia case with Norway or any other countries Finland is also included as one of the activities that are eligible to get carbon credit schemes so yes it is very possible is there any question I think if somebody wants to add something we have other questions coming up so another question that we received is for Daniel and Adam you mentioned ecological restoration by re-wetting in natural succession but we are wondering whether there are also plans to implement alternative plantations on re-wetted sites in Pali culture thank you for the question if I understand it correctly it was about whether polluter culture has been tested or trialled for those who don't know what polluter culture is it's the practice of growing or managing the land in a wet condition so that you keep the soil moisture close or near to the surface like in natural conditions but you're growing crops or grasses or trees that actually are adapted to those conditions so many native species but you're still using them for certain purposes so certainly polluter culture is a very attractive method for peatlands because you can actually use the peatlands but you're keeping them in a wet condition so they don't degrade however it's not a practice that is well understood yet we've got a list of polluter culture species and there have been some small scale research trials but it hasn't been done on very big areas yet so certainly we need to scale that up there is technology saying it's possible but how to do it over large areas how to make it economically viable is also a big challenge so definitely research needs to be done on that FAO and others the Ministry of Environment and Forestry Research Group here in Fordia it's called in Indonesia has done trials on that they do have established demonstration plots what we need to do is to get some funding and some finance to really scale that up test it across large areas and to get some of these products that are used from those polluter culture into an economic market chain so that people can make a genuine livelihood business out of it and also sustainably manage it test it so that it's sustainable so those things are promising but they're not demonstrated at a large scale yet and we need to actually put those in place particularly on the areas of peatlands that have been moderately degraded but can be restored with this active active revegetation but there are already people living there so I encourage that thanks for the question Anil would you like to add something yeah well this polluter culture practice can be combined with the in the Indonesian context the R3 one which is the revitalization of the local community and I think one should be mindful that the preference is always with the local people so we have to be careful in introducing polluter culture species if it is not well received we might end up with problems so it would be nice to after being tested scientifically one need to explore the response from the local community how they perceive about these species and certainly market is very important they usually have practice a lot of local species like rubber in the peatland and they know the market they know the network and they have practiced that for a long time and this is one thing that need to be considered also thank you thank you very much one more question from Kali from County Climate Governance Initiative the question is what kind of international governance or scheme is needed to promote national global and regional efforts in restoring peatlands in particular to balance different goals including climate change, biodiversity and livelihoods what kind of capacity building is needed at different levels like a big picture question but I think quite a relevant one as well anybody wants to take it on Daniel Daniel first Daniel certainly the Paris Agreement is one thing and it's still quite hot in term of the political will and in the light of the nationally determined contribution peatland certainly can be part of this exercise as I mentioned earlier the carbon asset is certainly very significant especially in Indonesia we know effort has been made how to include this in the NDCs in the early submission of the FRL peatland has been included but peatfire is not there so if we connect between this improvement of FRL and NDC and BUR and other discovering processes and reporting mechanism I think Paris Agreement will be a prominent destination to get the activities to get the attention of the activities on the ground so that's one thing but if it is related to other services that peatland can provide including biodiversity one can also use other mechanism within the biodiversity convention as well so multiple approach can be exercise in term of global governance thank you you wanted to add something yes one option is that we are starting to work on that now is to look at the international trading mechanisms like for example the ECOA, the airline industry Corsia scheme and to start including and to start working on making emission reductions from peatlands and actually marketable and the corollary guys of course better monitoring system and effort systems there are of course already VCS, voluntary carbon scheme projects active in Indonesia like Rimbau-Makmurtama, Rimbau-Makmurtja who successfully have been trading emission reductions to international buyers and so there is certainly scope and certainly scope for more but I think as well as international organizations active in peatlands I think like C4, FAO, UNIFI UNDP and particularly I think we should work we are working in a sense of putting the building box in place to indeed make that happen and through international research based payment schemes and I think particularly Indonesia is of course one case but I think I would like to underline this as well that of course there are large peatlands in South America in the Amazon basin as well in the Congo area which of course are facing similar challenges if you look at the recent Brazil forest fires I think you can underline that certainly not only Indonesian problem and that means as well that there is a need for collaboration to go beyond the Paris agreement and look at ways that we to better link in peatlands in the international in the international carbon offset markets bringing in the additional resources to accelerate efforts by government yes yes yes I want to add information on sustainable peat management in Indonesia yeah the first under Director General pollution control we have been successfully monitoring and mapping the peat areas and peat dome under concession holders area this will help us monitoring peat management and force private sector also responsible and second the monitor room for new palm oil plantation and third one law enforcement until now the Director General of law enforcement 110 companies has been sent warning by Ministry of Environment and Forestry and 19 companies are being suspended on their confession 14 companies are being investigated and one on process on the court yeah I hope the I hope the law enforcement make effective very effective for forest fire control in Indonesia thank you thank you for this complimentary information Mr Jetty we close to having to wrap up but on the Sunday is one more question from the audience at SIPA offices thank you for the chance to ask a question my name is Ian a researcher in here I actually want to ask in everyone's mind in here which actor actually have the most potential to make the effort of peatland restoration become sustainable in the long term like which actor actually have the most potential to make the effort of peatland restoration become sustainable in the long term that's my question yeah thank you very much I think that's a great question and what I'll do is that I'll give everyone each of the speaker a chance to answer and share any final thoughts before we close so starting with you Daniel the question is about who is the most influential, influential actors I don't know maybe everybody can play role in different ways we cannot single out to one particular actor in handling this huge problem extensive in terms of area as well as unique situation in places we cannot single out to one particular actor depends on what is driving the deforestation degradation and also draining and use of fire so if those are well identified I think those are the actors or stakeholders that one needs to work with very closely that's why I keep saying about R3 the revitalization if that is the case then how can you find out the alternative for these actors to have alternative for their livelihood if it is local community and which local community it's area they have different kind of interests and objective sorry I cannot say one particular one should be well studied thank you for the question from my side I would say that like Daniel says there are many actors that have many roles but I think they have different roles clearly the government in many countries has a huge role to play in terms of management decisions governments put in place legal frameworks that allow what happens in land or give licenses or in the case of Indonesia put a moratorium and then take them away and we've heard just then strong action being taken by the Ministry of Environment and Forestry in Indonesia on enforcement to make sure that those policies and practices are pursued by companies so that's really clear leadership and it's pleasing to hear so the government has a clear role but I also I think we've got other actors and players it's good you put it that way we've got companies who have leasehold lands or licenses to operate in certain areas different countries have different arrangements for that they need to be given guidelines on how to manage peatlands many times their perspective is making profit they don't necessarily know that what they're doing is unsustainable a lot of this peatlands management knowledge is only relatively recent and I'm talking the last few decades so we need to inform them they need to follow the rules but we also need to inform them on how to run their businesses to produce their products hopefully change their products to something that could be more sustainable on those lands consumers who are buying those products need to be educated they need to learn where their products and where of the impact that might have certainly that's happened with a number of products and I think there's a long way to go on that finally I'd say that there's a really strong role for local people as Daniel has mentioned a couple of times the original people who lived on a lot of these lands, the indigenous peoples they knew how to manage these lands sustainably and many of them are still there in the margins of that they're often in between their traditional livelihoods and the new market-based economy getting them an opportunity to be able to go back and live a more traditional life if they want to or at least learn how to do some of those activities in a more sustainable way and make a livelihood out of it is a really important thing that we could have been encouraged so there's a lot of actors with different roles putting them all together and informing them of these things is a huge challenge but it's something we need to do thanks thank you let's go over to your truck in your hand okay now I think to the actors I think has already been explained by the previous species all actors have to play a role but particularly as coming from the international community I think our role as well and I think in the recently the way we have facilitated for example the cooperation, South-South cooperation between countries to the Brassifil agreement I think it's an example how we can as the international community bring the PTC to the table and then an underlying as well that PIC is a global issue it's not only in the tropics but it's also an issue of temperate countries and it's not only in the tropical commodity supply chain but also in products like from temperate regions like for example also the European dairy products are produced on PIC plants which are emitting greenhouse gas emissions as we speak so from this perspective I think we have all to play a role and I think that our international community is actually to articulate and make both member states but also the wider communities aware of the importance of this tropical PIC plant to avoid a global climate disaster and while at the same time share and help to share and facilitate solutions to address these issues well you know for me you know there are two actors in addition to two actors have been explained by the previous speakers number one is the international community in terms of mobilizing resources to support the PIC restoration and PIC conservation implement done by country that have PIC land area so it is also important for international community to support in terms of the financing because the country is not sufficient to do that number two is the journalist as a journalist it is very important to write an article to educate the public how important PIC land not only for environment for ecosystem but also for local people by writing a good article will also contribute for people to protect and conserve and love the PIC land thank you and finally Mr. Jetty would you like to share a couple of words just very briefly before we wrap up yeah talking about the responsible for controlling the PIC ecosystem yeah of course of a ministry of environment and forestry has a function as regulator facilitator and controlling the implementation of course we cannot work it alone therefore we closely collaborated with other countries ministry other ministries sorry BRG international organization private sectors and active participant from communities we also strength operation with other countries such as Kono, Norway Peru Brazil Germany and many others thank you thank you very much and on that note thank you again for joining us today please don't hesitate to reach out to us if you have any follow up thoughts or questions I see that some colleagues would be interested in receiving the presentations you can reach the organizers by contacting the contact details were indicated in the advert for this webinar but we can also reach us on social media at c4 and at unred and because we'd really like to hear from you this is a discussion but for now this is goodbye so thank you all and have a nice day