Norway inks $1billion deal:

Discovery

Bakar

Elvestuen

Almost a decade after Norway signed a $1billion deal with Indonesia to help protect its tropical forests, the first payment for reduced emissions will be made after deforestation rates fell, environmentalists and government officials said.

Indonesia imposed a moratorium on forest-clearing under the 2010 climate deal, with payments linked to the Southeast Asian nation’s progress on lowering planet-warming emissions from felling trees, which release carbon when they rot or are burned.

Indonesian Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar and Norwegian Climate and Environment Minister Ola Elvestuen agreed the first payments would be made after deforestation rates dropped in 2017, according to a statement issued on Saturday by the Norwegian embassy in Jakarta.

No details were provided on the payment amount, although green groups estimate the figure to be about $20 million.

“It is a big deal because it reflects the fact that Indonesia has turned (a corner), and that is great news for all of us,” said Oyvind Eggen, director of the Oslo-based Rainforest Foundation Norway.

“We want to see from Indonesia that this is a trend and not a oneyear event,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Home to the world’s thirdlargest tropical forests, Indonesia is also the biggest producer of palm oil.

Environmentalists blame much of the forest destruction on land clearance for oil-palm plantations.

Deforestation and forest fires continue to blight many parts of the country, while revisions to the forest-cutting moratorium have lacked transparency, environmental campaigners say.

By November 2016, Indonesia’s forest moratorium covered an area of more than 66 million hectares (163 million acres).

In an attempt to tackle its annual haze from fires on deforested land, Indonesia switched its focus from containment to prevention after a particularly bad outbreak in 2015 that cost the country $16 billion and left more than 500,000 people