Adianto P. Simamora ,  The Jakarta Post ,  Nusa Dua, Bali   |  Fri, 05/29/2009 11:52 AM  |  National

Any carbon trading scheme developed to incorporate forests should be simple to encourage countries to protect these threatened areas and help cut emissions, an international forest conference said Thursday.

Forestry Minister M.S. Kaban said any scheme aimed at reducing emissions created by deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) should avoid the failures of the Kyoto Protocol.

"I hope in the process of assisting REDD and developing a successful scheme, we can help show that forests offer a solution to climate change, rather than being the source of the problem," Kaban told the international conference on REDD and illegal logging. His statements refered to the impractical and complicated Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which was designed for the forestry sector under the protocol but benefited few countries.

Currently, the only projects granted financial incentives under the protocol are reforestation projects.

Indonesia, as the world's third-large forest area with 120 million hectares and a region prone to the impacts of climate change, currently has no CDM schemes in place for forest areas.

Indonesia has said that CDM schemes require huge amounts of investment and offer little financial gain. The desirable Certificate for Emission Reduction (CER), which can be traded with developed countries, often take months to obtain.

It predicted that between 40 and 60 percent of the anticipated incentives from these CERs would be spent developing projects.

"I hope that the upcoming conference *on climate change* will learn from the failures of CDMs for forest protection, which ended up being complicated and unworkable," Kaban said.

The two-day conference was organized by the Asia Forestry Partnership (AFP) and Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) to explore the REDD opportunities for reducing illegal logging.

Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change RK Pachauri called for real action to mitigate climate change, including by curbing deforestation and limiting the global temperature increase to no more than two degrees Celsius.

"REDD needs to be examined very seriously and it's possible - even highly probable - the next meeting will have a clear provision for compensation for activities which reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation," Pachauri said in a video message Thursday.

"If such provision is included, it would add to the compulsion of countries to implement such strategies more effectively."

Christian Kuechli from Switzerland , a representative partner from the AFP, said forest governance was crucial to supporting the REDD and assisting poor rural areas.

"If local communities are not secured, and without an increase in resource flows to poor rural areas, the REDD will not work, and instead will be undermined and overthrown even in the presence of "legions of officials," he said.

"For central governments, REDD is a challenge, no doubt, with baselines needing to be established and monitored to avoid false claims and corruption."

The United Nations predicts annual revenue from the REDD credits could reach between $5 billion and $20 billion.

Officials worldwide will meet in Copenhagen in December to decide whether the REDD should be included in a new climate pact to substitute commitment under the Kyoto Protocol, which ends in 2012.