Impacts and Potential of BTRF Carbon Forestry Programmes

Given its centrality to any substantive efforts to safeguard global climate and biodiversity, Borneo represents a particularly decisive focal point for innovative, cutting edge and profitable Eco-Investment initiatives.

The potential of Carbon Forestry programmes in Borneo is spectacularly self-evident – on both the climate change mitigation and investment fronts:

• Deforestation over the last decade in Borneo is estimated at 1 million hectares per year!
• Every 10,000 hectares of standing rainforest could sequester as much as 6 million metric tonnes of carbon – the equivalent of taking five and a half million cars off the road. This represents the vehicle park of a fairly substantial city.
• The destruction of forests exposes them to the risk of fire. Fires in Kalimantan at the end of last year pumped at least two billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. That represents almost three times the annual fossil fuel emissions of the United Kingdom!
• The great Kalimantan fires of 1997/98 released the equivalent of 40% of global fossil fuel emissions. The resultant economic costs for the whole South East Asian region were estimated at USD 9 billion by the Asian Development Bank.
• Deforestation and forest clearing also leads to emissions from the underlying peatlands of Kalimantan. A study from Wetlands International shows that in recent years average annual emissions from peatlands are greater than the CO2 emissions from India or Russia – and almost three times the German emissions on an annual basis.
• If peatland emissions are included in the equation, Indonesia is already the third largest CO2 producer in the world –with most of the problem stemming from its Borneo provinces of Kalimantan.

BTRF benefits from technical partnership agreements with five key Regencies in Kalimantan.

This gives it stewardship access to substantial areas for the replication of projects to scale.

Just one of these Regencies, the District of Malinau (see next section), where the first River of Diamonds initiatives will be focused, has a land area the size of Switzerland!