The ceasefire line which divides Pakistan-administered Azad Jammu & Kashmir from Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir lies 23 kilometres away. Life is peaceful today in this part of the disputed region.

With peace there comes another challenge. Water, which was once abundant in Rawalakot district, is now drying up. Groundwater levels are 250 ft below the earth, while 50 years ago, they were closer to 70 ft deep.

Residents in Banjosa village believe the problem stretches back for two decades but say that in recent years it has become worse.

Sitting at roadside wooden bench Muhammad Naseem Khan, 50, a junior school teacher says water shortages are easy to spot. “Only three fountains out of eight left in area, which is alarming,” he says.

“We were growing tons of rice, maize and potatoes earlier, had healthy livestock but due to low rain, dry fountains and streams, even growing wheat is challenging,” adds retired army employee Muhammad Mumraiz Khan.

Women, whose job it is to provide household water are travelling further and further in the search for fresh springs.

Faiza, 18, is on her way to Dana Kottehri, a small village next to Banjosa, “I have to travel six km to attend school and further three km to get one gagar (pot) of water and mostly [I am] carrying water three times a day,” she says.

“It’s really hard to fetch water in a mountainous track on daily basis, spending half the day in school and rest of that in fetching water, grabbing most of my study hours, attending school with pain in my body.”

As we enter the small village of Danna Kottehri, another woman is pouring water in gagar and used oil cans through a motor driven pump.

Nussrat Khanam, 25, explains that an average household needs between 10 and 12 pots of water a day. Fetching this takes up most of her day. “I have invested my life for water fetching exercise but in return nutrition, health, education [are] still a distant dream” she says.

Asif Hayat, the sub-divisional officer at the public health department in Rawalakot says over-exploitation of water resources is to blame for the shortages. “The rapid increase in population and massive plantation of alien plants like eucalyptus are the main factors [to blame for] lowering water tables,” he explains. Fast-growing eucalyptus trees have been planted for cash crops, but have also been linked to the depletion of ground water levels.

Unpredictable weather is adding to the problem. Prolonged dry spells are followed by unexpectedly heavy rains and there is less snowfall. Asif Hayat explains that winter is arriving later and heavy rains are now common in summer.

Muhammed Yaqoob Khan, now in his 80s, has lived in Azad Kashmir since the 1930s, “In my 20s, I witnessed five or six feet snow falling from late October until mid March, now winter is approaching late in November and weather is getting warmer after mid February,” he says.

With slight pause and worried expression, he says, “Now it’s different, we were not using fans at home, but now it’s essential during summers. It’s really amazing in a mountainous area, isn’t it?”

Changing weather patterns means the government must get better at planning resources, says Dr. Asif Shah, an environmental scientist and director general of AJ&K (Azad Jammu & Kashmir) Earthquake Reconstruction & Rehebilitation Agency (SERRA) says.

“More care is needed in utilizing water resources across Kashmir and Pakistan because in the wake of recent events like 2010 floods, heavy rains and drought, it seems climate is changing at unexpected pace.”

The district government in Rawalakot has recently built additional water tanks, but local residents say this is not enough.

Rawalakot’s deputy commissioner Sohail Azam says there are abundant water supplies in the country. The challenge is to build the infrastructure.

“We have abundant water resources in Singara and working on Singara Water Supply Scheme with Chinese assistance,” he says. “After completion in 2014, this project would meet 0.1 million gallons per day water requirement of Rawalakot city alone.”

“We are planning the same for rural areas to develop small water reservoirs,” he adds.

This feature was produced by Faisal Raza Khan as part of a fellowship with the Climate Change Media Partnership, an initiative of Internews, IIED and Panos.

Some 30 minutes later, Steve is welcomed in Akasanko by traditional music blaring from a loudspeaker in a beer joint. It is morning, and scores of youths are huddled over bottles of beer and steaming plates of goat meat pepper soup. On hand to welcome Steve is the chief of the community Edet Offiong, alongside some youths. According Steve this sort of respect is important, and the villagers know it.

As project officer at the Cross River Forestry Commission, Steve is one of the government officials charged with ensuring that a programme for conserving the forests is implemented. He works in tandem with a Forest Management Committee, which is made up of, and run by, members of the community.

Inside the forest, which looks somewhat naked on account of the many trees that have been felled for firewood, Steve makes the rounds inspecting nurseries, and lecturing youths on why the forest must be regenerated. His voice mingles with the hooting of birds, and the noise of a lone pineapple farmer tending his crops. The farmer, Steve says, is allowed to grow pineapples because he agreed to help tend the nurseries and take care of young trees. Everyone else has been shut out.

“Three people who entered this forest for game and to cut wood were arrested and prosecuted last year,” begins Steve, his eyes flashing authoritatively.

“Here in Akasanko, we are trying hard to regenerate the forest by planting more trees. We have made it clear to the people that this is in their interest. In Cross River, we don’t cut trees anymore because we want them for carbon concession, so there is a ban on farming, logging and bush burning.”

Carbon concession is a climate change mitigation strategy. Forest communities and businesses agree plans to conserve trees which absorb carbon dioxide, rather than chopping them down.

From the United Nations Reducing Emissions through Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) programme, Nigeria recently netted $4million to carry out “REDD readiness,” a series of workshops and campaigns aimed at forest communities and oil companies. The aim is to help them get to grips with conservation and curbing carbon emissions.

Most of the UN REDD money will be poured into Cross River, a reward for what its officials describe as government’s ‘conscientious efforts to save the forests’. Many on the ground are already aware of the REDD money and expectations are massive.

In a country that has lost over 70 per cent of its forest cover, Cross River has been recognised as the ’environment capital’ of Africa’s most populous nation. It plays host to over 50 per cent of Nigeria’s last standing rainforests. And the government is fighting to continue protecting the forests, and projecting the image that it is doing so.

Chief Edet, who heads the Forest Management Committee in Akasanko, seems eager to drum up support for what the government is doing. He doesn’t expand upon the project except to say everything is going well. And from the way other villagers pay obeisance to Steve it appears, on the surface at least, that they have fallen into line. The fear of prosecution for those caught engaging in illegal activities inside the forest is real. A forestry law of 2010 imposes heavy fines and jail terms of up to two years on villagers who make unpermitted forays into the forests. But illegal logging still goes on, showing that a good number of people have not been persuaded.. .

Arikpo Arikpo, a member of the Cross River Forestry Commission, says the major challenges are poverty and a lack of alternatives.

“This was not just challenging in terms of livelihood, but also in terms of access to wood for basic activities. People are not so ignorant; they know the value of the forests and, all their life, they have been dependent on it.

“Their forefathers had protected the forests, but because of the level of want or need, they are forced into doing illegal things in the forests.”

Manus Eme Olory, a forest dweller in Ekurie – another forest community in Cross River state, is familiar with the predicament. “It has been difficult for us to hear that government is preserving the forest, and we can’t generate money from it for now,” he said

“What we have done in our area is to earmark some areas for farming. That is what we have called land use plan, and it has really worked well, such that we now know where to farm and where not to.

“Even before the ban on logging in the state, people in my community had long decided that there should be no logging in our forest. We have mapped the boundaries of the forest to monitor what goes on. So for us, we appreciate what government is doing.”

However, Edwin Usang, Executive Director of the Calabar-based Coalition for the Environment is hesitant about rolling over to praise the government. He thinks not enough is being done to provide alternatives and, as a result, people have continued to undermine the government’s efforts, albeit surreptitiously.

“There is still a lot of logging going on, and complaints abound of lots of timber coming out of the forests. I think government should come out with a policy, not to say don’t log, but this is how logging should be done. That is what I term sustainable logging and sustainable development. If you go to the community and say, don’t cut down this forest, you must provide an alternative.”

One of the major talking points at the climate talks in Durban last December was how to ensure that money from international climate financing initiatives reaches the ground. In fact, the need to dissuade the poor man with an axe from chopping down a tree was frequently evoked in discussions.

In Cross River, many people in forest communities are eagerly awaiting money from projects like UN REDD as a way of alleviating their poverty, so they can leave the forests to breathe, and mitigate climate change in that small but significant way.

Vast, red, dirt roads pave the way to the new agro-industrial frontier in Matto Grosso, in the centre of Brazil. The landscape is breathtaking. On one side of the road, the pastureland is populated by a few cows which raise their heads to follow the passing cars. On the other side of the road, industrially-planted soya mega-crops stretch to the horizon, forming perfect geometric patterns. Occasionally, a patch of forest breaks the monotony, a reminder this land was once part of the world’s largest rainforest.

Deforestation of its Amazonian rainforest – host to one third of the world’s tropical forest – is largely to blame for Brazil’s status as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in Latin America. For many years it had the highest deforestation rate anywhere in the world but international pressure and domestic mobilisation finally forced the Brazilian government to act.

The government of the former president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva began to enforce long-neglected forest laws. This allowed him to withhold money from states which failed to prevent deforestation, and to ban the sale of products grown in illegally deforested areas. The government used satellite imagery to monitor lawbreakers, sent in police to raid illegal loggers, and black-listed municipalities with the worst deforestation record. The strategy paid off: in six years the rate of deforestation had fallen by 70 per cent.

“Things have been turn upside down”, said Valmir Schneider, a soya farmer in the town of Querencia, a soya production region in the Amazonian state of Mato Grosso.

“First they asked us to come to these lands and now we are the villains for turning it productive.”

Schneider moved here from Rio Grande do Sul, a southern state with a large German migrant population in the 1980s during a government-sponsored colonisation programme. Deforestation was national policy then in a bid to populate the far-flung Amazonian jungles, which the government then regarded as unproductive. The scattered groups of indigenous people living in the Amazon were seen as savages and not treated like Brazilian citizens.

Thirty years later in Mato Grosso, intensive deforestation and agrobusiness have taken their toll. “The Xingu has changed,” said Ianukula Kaibi-Suiá, who lives in one of the indigenous towns along the Xingu River, the state’s main water source and one of the tributaries of the Amazon River. “There is little fishing, the water is murky and there are fewer species,” he explained.

Despite the fact that Xingu valley is designated as a national park, a growing number of soya farms and cattle ranches encircle the reserve. Farmers have chopped down river banks and trees, in turn drying up the water sources that run into the Xingu.

In 2004, about 6,000 Indians, whose habitat is dependent on water sources in the reserve, issued an S.O.S to activists and local authorities. Several organisations initiated a project to encourage farmers and landowners to reforest and comply with the law.

Schneider is one of the farmers that were convinced to take part. He did so after his municipality was blacklisted by the federal government and local authorities put pressure on those not complying with the law. He acknowledges that currently only 25 per cent of its 2,000 hectare property is preserved as forest. The current law stipulates 50 per cent. Like Schneider, nine out of ten farmers are out of step with the law.

Natura, a Brazilian cosmetics firm, is supporting the reforestation of Scheider’s land by buying seeds and funding the replanting in a 30-year agreement.

“The true incentive would be for me to be paid for keeping the forest standing up,” said Schneider. “It’s a long term commitment and a huge responsibility but I don’t get much out of it,” he said. Schneider has heard about carbon markets, but is only vaguely aware of how they work.

In the absence of financial incentives, other factors play a part. Natalia Guerin, a researcher for the Instituto Socio Ambiental-ISA, the NGO which leads the reforestation project, believes that;

“They don’t do it necessarily because they love nature or care about environment, but because that they see a benefit in it, avoiding fines and prosecution and protecting the water they desperately need.”

Reforestation has also opened new markets. In fields deforested for pasture, the trees grow back if there are no cattle. Time and barbed-wire are the ultimate technologies. But in soil that has been industrially planted, native seeds have been removed or killed, so the forest needs to be replanted.

“Look, this is the pit of jatobá and this is of guanandi,” said Santino Sena, a man with tanned skin and gnarled hands, collecting native seeds which had floated to the surface in a swamp in the jungle of Canarana, another municipality of Mato Grosso.

Like him, 300 other seed collectors supply a growing market: between 2007 and 2010 the sale of forest seeds for reforestation quadrupled. Farmers buy the seeds and the municipality supports a nursery and brokers the sales. “Before I didn’t think twice and now it hurts if I cut a tree,” said Sena, who used to make a living by chopping down trees. He owns a house, a small Fiat and a motorbike that he paid in part with seeds. In a year can earn up to 10,000 Reales (US$ 6,000). The seed market is now moving onto the Internet.

The demand for native seeds has grown not only from government pressure but also thanks to technology. The Instituto Socio Ambiental, where Guerin works, has put in place a technique to use the soya planting machinery to plant forest seeds, speeding-up the process and reducing labour.

But reforestation is going at snail’s pace compared to the rate of multi-million dollar business expansion. Brazil is the largest exporter of beef in the world and second-largest exporter of soybeans after the United States. Agriculture accounts for 22 per cent of the country’s GDP. Controlling and securing food production today is as strategic as having oil or a nuclear warhead. Experts estimate that to restore life to the Xingu valley, 300,000 hectares need to be reforested, of which so far only about 3,000 have been recovered.

Environmentalists fear that even the new-found support from farmers for reforestation might be damaged by a proposed Forest Code to be voted on in Brazil´s Congress. The code, which has yet to be tabled, is being pushed forward by ‘ruralistas’, the powerful bloc of politicians who defend agro-industry interests. They call it a more realistic law in line with developing the Brazilian economy.

Environmentalists such as former presidential candidate Marina Silva, claim, however, it will simply foster deforestation by reducing conservation areas and granting amnesty to those who chopped trees in the past. “Brazil is goging to through a crucial moment,” she said.

“Since 1965 we have a law to protect forests in Brazil but the new forest code reverses the logic: it is a law to facilitate farming”

This feature was produced by Lorenzo Morales as part of a fellowship with the Climate Change Media Partnership, an initiative of Internews, IIED and Panos.

Our media houses rarely fund such trips, especially to report on the environment which our editors give low priority to.

For us journalists, this can make work in our newsrooms frustrating, but when we do get to travel we realize that the environment beat is not neglected worldwide.

When I travelled to the UN climate change conference in Durban last month — with a fellowship from the Climate Change Media Partnership — I was amazed.

Whichever way I turned my head in the media centre, I could meet new journalist friends from every continent on Earth.

At the cafeteria nearby I could chat with experienced environment reporters from around the world – people whose articles form part of my daily diet in my newsroom back home.

I am not exaggerating when I say that reporting on the UN climate change talks is one of the best experiences an environment journalist could ever have. Suddenly it seems as if everyone in the world talks only about forests, water and climate.

My fellowship was funded by the Growing Forest Partnerships initiative, whose journalism programme I work for in Nepal.

The two week meeting was an amazing opportunity for me to develop the knowledge and skills I apply to that role by learning and networking with people from around the world.

Forests are everywhere at the climate change conference. From the entrance gate to the large exhibition hall and in negotiating rooms themselves, people are talking about trees.

Outside of the conference centre too, I learnt about the forests and how hard it is to generate new ones.

At the Buffelsdraai landfill site, operated by Durban municipality at the outskirts of the city, I visited an innovative project has helped women from local communities become “tree-preneurs“.

They sell seedlings of indigenous species to the municipality which then plants them across hundreds of hectares of former sugar cane fields.

The trip to Durban counted a lot for me as it provided an opportunity to learn and make new friends, to report back to local audiences in Nepal about the global talks and gain international exposure for my stories.

For any environment journalist in a dilemma about whether to continue their profession, this kind of meeting can inspire optimism. Amid the swirling politics, we can see the world coming together to discuss how forests, water and climate are all important for our future.

These are the stories we must keep telling.

Busisiwe Ndlela

Busisiwe Ndlela was radiant when I met her yesterday. Just this month, and with money she earned selling tiny trees, she has bought a new cupboard and an electric stove and she is proud as can be.

I met this 60-year old mother of seven on the outskirts of Durban, South Africa where she and hundreds of other women are helping to transform their communities and the landscape around them, one seed at a time.

Welcome to the Buffelsdraai landfill site, operated by the eThekwini (Durban) municipality. Under law there must be a buffer zone between it and local residents, and until recently this was occupied by fields of sugar cane.

“Sugar cane did nothing for us,” says Busisiwe when I ask her about life before the tree-planting project began. “It was for them [white farmers], not us.”

This all changed in 2008, when the municipality began to work with local people to turn this 800-hectare area into a mosaic of native grasses and rich forest, to help offset the carbon emissions associated with South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 World Cup.

As the new trees mature over the next 20 years, they will absorb 48,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide — about the same amount produced by 25,000 passengers flying from Northern Europe to South Africa and back again.

As well as helping to limit climate change, the project aims to protect wild nature, improve water quality downstream and create new livelihoods for poor local communities.

It is a simple idea, and it revolves around jobless local people like Busisiwe becoming ‘tree-preneurs’.

First, they collect seeds of native tree species and then they plant them at home in old bottles, plastic bags and other containers. Once the trees reach a certain height the tree-preneurs can sell them to the municipality, which then grows them up a bit more in a nursery before planting them in the buffer zone.

So far more than 600 people have got involved — 80 percent of them women — and they have sold a quarter of a million baby trees, including acacias and several species of wild fig trees.

A 30-centimetre tall tree is worth five rand but if a tree-preneur tends it a little longer and it reaches a metre in height, she can sell it for ten rand (US$1.25). In reality, this is a cashless project. Instead the tree-preneurs receive vouchers that they can exchange for things like food, building materials and school fees for their children’s education.

Since 2008, Busisiwe has sold about 1,200 trees and — depending on their height — this will have earned her vouchers worth between US$750 and US$1500. In a part of the world with 80 percent unemployment, few opportunities and a minimum wage of under a dollar an hour, this income is not to be sniffed at.

The star seed planter though is Ningi Gcabashe. She has sold 15,000 trees to the project and now works as a facilitator, teaching other members of the community about native tree species and how to grow them from seed.

“When the project came to Buffelsdraai, I never realised it would help the community,” said Ningi yesterday, before explaining that she has been able to build a new home using bricks she brought with vouchers from the trees.

“My life improved,” she said. “Before the project I never touched a car. Now I have paid for driving lessons.”

Today she manages the Trees for Life programme of the Wildlands Conservation Trust, the organisation that runs the reforestation at Buffelsdraai. This is just one of several full-time jobs the project has created.

There is temporary work too, especially at this rainy time of year when around 60 communities members are paid to plant trees.

And in a couple of years when the job is complete and 500 hectares of forest have been replanted, new opportunities will spring up.

“After the canopy is planted there will be enrichment plantings, i.e. planting in the understory to increase the biodiversity in the forest,” says Sean O’Donoghue of the eThekwini municipality’s environmental planning and climate protection department.

“Thereafter we’re hoping to create jobs with regards maintaining the forest,” he says. “There will also be waste-preneur opportunities — collection of recyclable waste and selling back to us. And we hope to stimulate eco-tourism in the buffer zone, for example mountain bike tracks.”

The idea is that these activities can form the basis of sustainable businesses and long-term employment for the surrounding communities.

In time, the forest can bring many new benefits but women like Busisiwe and Ningi are already gaining from the greening. “People did not believe,” says Ningi. “Now they do.”

This story originally appeared at Mike Shanahan’s blog — Under the Banyan

A report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warns that unless action is taken the loss of wild species will accelerate because of a range of threats.

These include drought and wildfires, the spread of invasive species, pests and pathogens, changes to the way species interact with each other, and increased conflict between humans and wildlife. 

With climate change adding to existing threats – such as deforestation, pollution, hunting, and urban expansion – the future looks bleaks for 200 animal species in Tanzania that the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifies as “endangered” or “critically endangered”.

These include the black rhino, green turtle, rondo bush baby, Usambara blue-bellied frog, Tanzania shrew, woolly bat, wild dog, Sokoke scops-owl and hammerhead shark.

But efforts to protect the habitats of wild species – from both climate change and other threats – can bring benefits to people too. 

The FAO report Wildlife in a Changing Climate  urges governments to act to maintain current ecosystems, particularly those that are still healthy and intact and are most likely to best withstand climate change.

Other measures it recommends include setting up networks of protected areas, integrating conservation with forest management, and restoring ecosystems that are important for climate change resilience but are already badly degraded. These include mangroves, inland wetlands, forests, savannahs and grasslands.

It says these kinds of actions could help people adapt to the impacts of climate change by protecting the natural resources that can make them resilient.

Edmund Barrow, head of the IUCN’s Ecosystem-based Adaptation Programme, offers an example from the past with relevance for the present: the case of Shinyanga.

In 1985, then-President Julius Nyerere declared Tanzania’s Shinyanga area to be a desert. People had lost many of the important environmental goods and services that their livelihoods depended on – including dry season grazing, timber and fuel wood, traditional medicines and fruits and other products they could sell such as honey and resin.

Barrow says that thanks to good development practices, farmers managed to restore over 300,000 hectares of forest and woodland by 2004.

“Although in 1985, climate change had not yet come onto the agenda, it is clear that resilience and risk management were important to the people of Shinyanga,” says Barrow. “Now over 25 years later – these foundations of resilience and risk management are important foundations on which to build and develop climate change strategies.”

“The Shinyanga people are now far more resilient to shocks and climate variability. Now the task will be to assess how resilient these systems are in the face of real climate change,” he added.

Although Tanzania has many conservation areas such as national parks, game reserves, marine parks and nature reserves, many of them are under threat from human activities and extreme weather events.

George Jambiya, governance adviser for WWF’s Coastal East Africa Network Initiative, notes that laws have been established to protect the conservation areas but the government does not have enough money, staff and equipment to enforce the laws.

“The lack of these things has led to poaching and other illegal activities,” he said.

The countries bring widely varying numbers of people to the task.

For about 95 countries (those in colours other than red), this map shows the number of pre-registered participants and the climate risk index for 2010 as determined by GermanWatch.

Click on each country to see the numbers. On the climate risk index, a lower number signifies a higher level of climate risk.

For a full list of countries’ delegates, climate risk index rank and Gross National Income per resident in dollars, click here (Excel file).

Analysis:
By Hoy Chicago (Note: The tally of delegates was compiled by hand and has a 1 percent margin of error).

Sources: 
GermanWatch 2010
UNFCCC list of COP17 delegates (part 1 here, part 2 here).
World Bank Little Data Book on Climate Change 2011

The talks are a complex web of simultaneous sessions and Malawi simply does not have enough skilled negotiators to be in every room. Nor can it offer much in exchange for action from more powerful nations to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases or provide money to help Malawi deal with the impacts of climate change.

Countries like Malawi do have one trick up their sleeves – the ability to form alliances — but even so the main power lies in the hands of large individual nations.

“It is a rather a tricky situation for us to negotiate as a country,” says Evans Njewa, head of Malawi’s negotiating team. “But through blocks to which we are affiliated we are able to get our views heard. Through these groupings we make our contributions and through our spokespersons our position is presented to the United Nations.”

Coalitions mean compromise

Malawi is a member of more of these negotiating blocks than most other countries. It is in the Least Developed Countries group, the Africa group, and the G77 alliance of 131 developing nations. It also works in partnership with the 43-nation Alliance of Small Island States.

Each of these groups wants rich nations to make legally binding commitments to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases. But Canada, Russia, Japan and the United States say they will only do that if big emerging economies like China, Brazil, India and South Africa also make their pledges binding.

What does that mean for countries like Malawi, where climate change threatens the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals as well as the delivery of the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy?

“There is power in togetherness and we feel talking as a group carries more weight,” says Njewa, who added that Malawi’s main position was to lobby for more donor support to help it adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Just as countries can form negotiating blocks, the blocks can also form alliances. Pa Ousman Jarju, chair of the Least Developed Countries group, says that collaborating with other blocks is not a sign of desperation but shows the passion his group has for finding solutions to address climate change.

But country positions do not automatically become those of the larger group, whose agendas must be common to all of their members. This makes it hard for a country like Malawi to call for all that it wants.

Punching above its weight

Malawi could be more influential if it took the climate change talks more seriously, according to Dingani Jere, Malawi’s national coordinator for the Christian advocacy organization, the Act Alliance.

He says Malawi undermines its position by not having the President or top government officials attend.

“This is a serious meeting and looking at how crucial the issue is, we needed the President to be here,” says Jere. “After all we are just close by to South Africa. With such an attitude I don’t think we can be that influential.”

Felix Jumbe, the president of the Farmers Union of Malawi and vice president of the Southern African Confederation of Agricultural Unions says the absence of Malawi’s president and other leaders is telling. “I think they knew that even if they made it to here they would not have changed anything,” he says. “I think such meetings are a waste of time and money.”

With little more than 24 hours to go before the end of the 2011 climate change conference, the principal secretary at Malawi’s ministry of foreign affairs, Anthony Livuza, told this reporter that the negotiations were difficult because of rich countries’ unwillingness to act. He says the impasse is very disappointing for Malawi.

“We came with a lot of hope and now our hope seems to be tampered with,” he says. “We were hoping for more commitments because Malawi faces a lot of constraints in terms of funds and capacity to deal with complex issues of climate change.” 

For Indonesia, the key to reaching economic prosperity is by using its forest resources. At the same time, Jakarta has stated the government’s commitment to reduce 26% of its greenhouse gas emission by 2020. Keeping forests alive is the best way to achieve that.

For over 40 years, Indonesia has been relying its national income from natural resources. According to Daju Pradnja Resosudarmo, a researcher on forestry governance from the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR),  around 70% of Indonesia’s non-tax revenue comes from natural resources.

The efforts to keep forests alive are facing stiff competition from the flurry of activities surrounding mining and oil palm industry. Daju mentions the increasing trend of expansion in mining activities and oil palm plantations. Oil palm plantations needed land converted from forests. Coal deposits are also mostly stored in forest lands in Borneo.

Both of these industries are backed with a steady flow of foreign investors, low interest rates from banking institutions, and relatively cheap tax on land. Put all these factors together, it’s a no-brainer. Keeping forests dead is still the more profitable option than keeping forests alive.

The way Daju puts it, “Other development sectors are heavily subsidised. If governments make land more expensive, then it lessens the competition on forest land. Therefore the government should start subsidising more environmental projects.”

Indonesia has expressed interest in an economic scheme called REDD or Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. The scheme obliges forest-owning developing countries to keep their forests intact. In return, developed countries would pay financial incentives to ecosystem services from the forests of developing countries. Unfortunately for the last five years countries have yet to agree the financial mechanism of the REDD scheme.

In order to benefit from this scheme, Indonesia would need to proof that they really can protect their forests from degradation or excessive logging. Unfortunately, deforestation rates in Indonesia continues to be high. Daju mentions five main factors contributing to the high rate of deforestation, one of them is administration.

In 2010, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has stated a moratorium on granting new licenses to manage primary natural forests and peat lands for the next two years. Although this does not apply to existing licenses.

Forests cover 70% of Indonesia’s land area. All of those forests areas are state-owned. However, a decentralisation programme is returning forest management back to local and regional government. This situation creates many overlapping licenses of forest land management. The five-year political cycle also creates a problem. After the election of regional leaders, there appears to be a trend of issuing new forest licenses to party donors.

Indonesia is now facing a dilemma. On one hand, there is an international commitment and (promises of) economic incentives when forests are protected. On the other hand, forests and its services are still one the country’s main income. The country also has to fulfill its projected growth of 7 percent by 2014.

After decades of relying on its natural resources to build its economic power, Indonesia is now faced with the challenge of thinking about other sources of income.

Chief of the Presidential Work Unit for Development Monitoring and Control Kuntoro Mangkusubroto acknowledges this. As of September 2010, he has also been chairman of REDD+ task force. One of his task is to find the best way to balance reaching economic growth while still protecting forests.

When asked what is the proposed economic model that Indonesia would use to switch from natural resources, his response was that at the moment, his team is still trying to find a model that will address balancing economic growth with finding solutions to the problem.

The two years moratorium, according to him, gives him the time to take pause and review laws and regulations of natural resources that have been there for four decades.

He sees the main problem in forests protection is regulation. “We know there are loopholes, overlaps, and gaps in current legislation. It fails to recognise indigenous rights and it is open for corruption on forestry governance.”

For the first time he announced that Indonesia has a single official map of forests. Before, each ministry, regional government or central government, had their own map of forests. The result is there can be two or three different licenses to manage a single forest.

“To start managing forest, we need to come up with a new set of laws that would address the cross-cutting nature of the issue. There are already two task force assigned by the president. Their job is to produce a new legislation draft to be submitted to house of legislation.”

The World Bank’s Managing Director, and also Indonesia’s ex-finance minister, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, sees forestry as the big test for Indonesia to proove its commitment internationally. “If we can show proof of it (protection) that can be verified internationally, that we are committed to REDD, I see it as a very good for Indoensia’s credibility, especially when (Indonesia is) trying to get more and more funding outside of forestry and REDD itself.” The key to implementing it, she said, is tackling the regional and provincial level, where the most of the main players are.

As all these images crystallize to become what many hope will be a positive outcome in Durban, imagine too the image of a man with an axe, preparing to chop down a tree. The fate of that nameless man in a community, and the trees — many trees — he may chop down, depend directly on the results of the deliberations in Durban. Menacing as he might seem, standing there with his axe, this man tells a story about the many people in African rural areas who survive by getting their daily needs from the forests. Firewood for cooking, herbs for curing common ailments, and the tasty bush meat that would grace steaming pots of soups, all come from the forests.

So as an estimated 1200 participants gathered on December 4 for Forest Day 5, a major side event at this UN climate meeting , I tried to see how the interests of that man who many of us know was being protected. The opening plenary of the 5th-annual Forest Day, organized by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), painted a gloomy picture.

Helen Gichohi, President of the Africa Wildlife Foundation, said that a massive wave of deforestation was sweeping across Africa, threatening its ecosystems, and eviscerating the continent’s resilience to climate change. She suggested that the UN  mechanism known as the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), may provide an answer to both deforestation and climate change.  She however said that for it to be effective more needed to be done to pump money into REDD+, so as to halt the obliteration of forests in Africa, while simultaneously reducing the causes of climate change by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. According to a working draft document of the UN-REDD Programme, the loss of natural forests through deforestation and degradation  contributes about 17 percent of total global emissions of greenhouse gases.

It was however not clearly explained how the money that flows in through the REDD+ programmes in various countries would reach the man with the axe, so that he doesn’t have to wield it. At one of the breakout sessions which focused on biodiversity safeguards in REDD+, the UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Caroline Spelman, also urged that agreement be reached here in Durban on REDD+ financing. However, Spelman admitted that getting the money to reach the very people at the end of the line was a herculean task. But she agreed that for ‘the man with the axe’ , some creative ways had to be adopted to get the money from REDD+ to reach him.