TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Indonesia has great potential to use nature-based solutions to combat climate change, said a senior official from the Coordinating Ministry for Maritime Affairs and Investment at the Indonesia Net-Zero Summit in Jakarta on Saturday, August 24.

The country's potential could contribute 15 percent of the world's nature-based solutions, with an estimated 6.7 gigatons of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2e), said the ministry's Deputy for Coordinating Environment and Forestry Management Nani Hendiarti.

"We are in a tropical country. We have 125 million (hectares) of tropical forest. We have peat, we have mangroves, and we have very large areas of land. So the open and used land is also quite a lot, used in a context that can also help absorb the carbon," she noted.

Recognizing this potential, the government has issued a work plan to reduce emissions - especially in the Forestry and Other Land Use (FOLU) sector - to achieve the target by 2030.

FOLU Net Sink 2030 refers to a state to be achieved where the level of greenhouse gas (GHG) absorption by the FOLU sector is equal to or greater than the level of emissions in 2030.

She explained that one of the efforts that the government continues to make together with relevant stakeholders is the reduction of land fires and deforestation, which contribute massively to the amount of GHG emissions in the country, apart from the energy sector.

The rate of deforestation has been successfully slowed down in recent years, with government data showing that in the period 1996-2000, an area of 3.51 million hectares was deforested.

This figure then decreased to 1.09 million hectares in the 2014-2015 period and 470 thousand hectares in the 2018-2019 period. Deforestation continued to slow down by 75 percent and was recorded at 115,000 hectares in the 2019-2020 period. In 2022, deforestation reached 104,000 hectares.

Indonesia also recorded a decrease in land fires, which covered an area of 105,539.57 hectares this year, compared to 1.6 million hectares in 2019 and 1.16 million hectares last year. "What the government is doing is a preventive effort," she said.

Antara

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