Indonesia, a country with the world’s third largest tropical rainforest, has also one of the highest deforestation rates in the world. In addition to resulting in a dramatic loss of the archipelago’s unique biodiversity, this deforestation also contributes significantly to climate change, which in turn threatens the livelihoods of millions of people who live across 17 000 islands.

The Indonesia UN-REDD Programme has been launched to assist the Government of Indonesia in its REDD + readiness efforts, in order to establish and organize a fair, equitable and transparent REDD+ architecture in the country. Moreover, one of the important aims for the Programme is to support the Government of Indonesia to build consensus on key issues for national REDD+ policy development. In this regard, UN-REDD Indonesia aims to contribute to an inclusive process where multi-stakeholder participation and empowerment of local stakeholders are central in the National REDD+ Strategy.

After a series of national consultations for the initial drafts of the strategy, a series of regional consultations will be held in order to ensure multi-stakeholder participation from all regions. After the second draft has been developed, BAPPENAS and UN-REDD will conduct a national consultation workshop in order to get additional inputs and approach a national consensus.

The current draft strategy identifies poor spatial planning, tenurial problems, ineffective forest management, and weak legal basis and law enforcement as being amongst the main causes for deforestation and forest degradation in Indonesia. The draft proposes planning reforms in the land use sector, law reformation and enforcement within a climate-friendly legal framework, stakeholder involvement in keeping with the Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) principle in the REDD+ implementation, and good governance principles, such as transparency, participation and accountability in the different processes. The document stresses the importance of including potentially affected people and vulnerable groups in the design and implementation of the country’s REDD+ strategy.

The multi-stakeholder consultation process will produce several drafts of the strategy, and a final document is expected to be ready by early November. The final draft will be a ‘living’ document, meaning that new insights and inputs may be incorporated into the document as REDD+ evolves, and lessons learned will be shared with other countries. The document will function as a guideline for the development of sub-national REDD+ action plans and will be mainstreamed into the development processes.

A recent mission was carried out by UN-REDD Programme representatives at the end of August to help address logistical issues, such as capacity building for government staff, communications requirements, support from international experts, as well as developing the thinking for new ways to increase the value of standing forests.
The concerted effort between UN agencies, combined with the country’s commitment towards conserving forests and ensuring equitable benefits to local populations, catalyzes new funding opportunities in the climate change forestry sector.

Drafts of Indonesia's REDD+ strategy are publicly available in Indonesian and in English on UN-REDD Indonesia’s website: www.un-redd.or.id. Comments and inputs to the National REDD+ Strategy can be sent to nationalstrategy@un-redd.or.id and kehutanan@bappenas.go.id.