Harnessing opportunities to upscale forest landscape restoration in Indonesia

Abstract

Indonesia must upscale forest landscape restoration (FLR) efforts to meet its ambitious targets, including absorbing more carbon from forests than emitted by 2030. We review the status quo of forest degradation and FLR efforts, regulations, and funding in Indonesia to identify opportunities for upscaling. We develop a framework to better align FLR funding and benefits and guide broader contributions from global and national private sectors to finance and implement these efforts. Until now, FLR projects primarily have been led and funded by government institutions with the main goal of rehabilitating critical lands to mitigate flooding and landslides. These alone are unlikely to achieve the scale required to meet national and global restoration pledges. One opportunity to upscale FLR in Indonesia is facilitating natural recovery to restore the >43 million ha of secondary forest. However, harnessing this opportunity requires a paradigm change in the government definition of degraded areas, expanding the current deforestation moratorium to include secondary forests, improving land tenure clarity, and revising and streamlining government regulations to facilitate non-governmental actors in FLR. Two existing institutional arrangements, social forestry and ecosystem restoration concessions, could be expanded to at least 2–3x the current extent, along with increasing the state forest land area available for FLR. Such arrangements could be funded from international and domestic sources through carbon markets, direct funding from donors and investors, and compensation schemes within company operations. Moreover, better coordination is needed among governmental, non-governmental, and academic actors and local communities to develop robust, equitable, and long-term FLR programs.