‘AG’s Chambers yet to receive documents from Hoch Standard’
KOTA KINABALU: The Sabah Forestry Department reiterated that the State A orney-General’s Chambers has yet to receive the relevant documents from Hoch Standard Pte Ltd (HSPL) which has signed a 100-year carbon trade agreement involving two million hectares of land with the state government.
Its Chief Conservator of Forests, Datuk Frederick Kugan, said this requirement is part of the State’s “due diligence” process on the Singapore company, which shall cover material ma ers to ascertain its professional capacity to undertake such a large and complex project going beyond carbon.
Kugan said in June 2023, the Sabah Forestry Department had received a formal request from Deputy Chief Minister I/ Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Industries, Datuk Seri Panglima Dr Jeffrey Kitingan, through the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Industries on behalf of HSPL and its local counterpart, for a “pilot site” of 190,051 hectares.
The area included the Nuluhon Trusmadi Forest Reserve (Class I) amongst others. This “pilot site” would test the framework for the perceived outputs of the Nature Conservation Agreement (NCA), and the exceptional financial gains that are potentially deliverable to the State.
This “pilot site” was meant to be the “proof-of-concept” for Nature Capital and is outside of the ambits of the agreement signed between HSPL and the State Government. This is due to the fact that HSPL is still required to fulfill the conditions stipulated by the State Government, he said in a statement on Wednesday in response to respond to the statement by Jeffrey on the NCA on March 15.
With regard to the signed NCA, Kugan said the State Government is in the process of reviewing several clauses contained within the document, to provide for greater clarity for the provision of such clauses. The State Government is also reviewing with greater scrutiny the legality of the provisioned clauses to build a legal framework by which the NCA could be operationalised. When completed, this will form an Addendum to the currently in operatable NCA and shall cover the issues concerning the “designated area” which comes under the purview of the government.
“These are some of the safeguards that must be fulfilled and should not be compromised by any parties in order to protect our natural heritage and its access for generations to come,” said Kugan.
The NCA is a profit-sharing agreement based on carbon trading and monetising other non-carbon and natural capital from two million ha of Sabah’s forest reserves designated under the NCA.
Carbon trading involves the buying and selling of carbon credits, which would permit companies and other organisations to emit carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. The aim of the marketbased system is to reduce emissions that contribute to global warming.
Under the NCA, 70 per cent of the revenue from the sale of Sabah’s carbon credits and other natural capital will go to the state government. The remaining 30 per cent will go to Hoch Standard.