What can a Clean Development Mechanism do to enhance trees in the land scape? Experience with rubber, coffee and timber-based agroforestry systems in Indonesia

Abstract

Terrestrial carbon storage is one of a broader array of environmental services and lessons that can be shared between the mechanisms developed or under development for watershed functions, biodiversity, carbon storage and landscape beauty. In many situations a “bundling” of services will be needed to provide sufficient incentives for smallholders to avoid conversion to low-ES land use types. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is often considered to be intended for project-scale investment, with the reforestation CDMs focussed on fast growing trees. In fact, the mechanism can also be used by local government units to use an array of incentives to stimulate their farmers to convert the landscape to a more tree-based land use pattern, as long as a sufficient part of the landscape makes the transition from non-forest (less than 30% crown cover with Indonesia’s operational forest definition) to forest (more than 30% crown cover of trees potentially growing to more than 5 m tall, at a 0.5 ha scale). A number of constraints to more tree-based land use can be identified and efforts to remove the key constraints at local scale can qualify under the Clean Development Mechanism, as long as there is a measurable increase in overall carbon stock. As a delivery mechanism, the reduction of taxes and of transaction costs for land use agreements (HKM) may be more effective for farmers than direct payments. The paper discusses the land use patterns in three benchmark sites of the Alternatives to Slash and Burn (ASB) program in Indonesia, with rubber and coffee-based land use systems