World’s first pulpwood plantation to carbon reserve

Indonesia will become the home of the world’s first privately-funded project turning pulpwood plantation concessions into a carbon reserve. The Kampar Carbon Reserve, located in Riau Province in Sumatra, is being established on land previously approved for pulpwood plantation in a unique public-private partnership announced in Jakarta today.

Creation of the Kampar Carbon Reserve is being led by the green entrepreneur firm Carbon Conservation to re-allocate more than 15,000 hectares of deep peat carbon sink from concessions allocated for pulpwood plantation to conservation land in an effort to open the door to this world-first pilot project.

Currently for at least the next 30 years the bio-diverse rich peat dome of Kampar Carbon Reserve is expected to preserve significant amounts of carbon. Carbon stock assessments conducted in the coming months will confirm the amount.

The project is designed to use the sale of REDD-Plus credits to inject millions of dollars into local job creation and community development programs in the indigenous communities surrounding the land over the lifespan of the preservation programme. The community development programmes will help reduce the pressures exerted on the forest from the local communities, while still allowing local residents to improve their livelihoods and to prosper.

“Working with APP we are giving new life to a carbon-rich piece of land that is roughly a quarter the size of Singapore that we are now conserving as a protected carbon plantation,” said Dorjee Sun, CEO of Carbon Conservation, co-headquartered in Australia and Singapore. “This is the first real attempt by a pulpwood producer to measure the difference in carbon conservation of what would have happened in its existing state, what would happen in a pulpwood plantation scenario and what will happen after preservation.”