Indonesia, Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo together hold more than half of the world’s tropical rainforests.
In 2022, when Indonesia hosted the G20 summit in Bali, the three countries pledged to cooperate on how to pay to protect those forests. The promise was one of South-South cooperation: developing countries working together rather than waiting for aid from the wealthy North.
Four years on, that pledge has yet to become a real negotiating bloc in which countries agree on a single position and speak with one voice. Then as now, Indonesia is well placed to make it actually happen.
The forest countries of the South share a common problem. They are asked to keep vast forests standing for the good of the planet, yet they have little money of their own to do it.
In April, Indonesia’s finance minister warned that high oil prices could push this year’s budget deficit to 2.9% of the economy. The Republic of Congo, which owes about US$5 billion abroad, is exploring a deal to cancel part of its debt in return for forest protection.
Help from the North is meager and uneven. Researchers at the Center for International Forestry Research have shown that the Congo Basin received just 11% of international tropical forest financing between 2008 and 2017, compared with 55% for Southeast Asia and 34% for the Amazon.
The price paid for results is low. A 2022 study found that Norway paid Indonesia about $1 per tonne of carbon emissions its forests helped avoid, far below Norway’s stated rate of $5.
A new global fund will test whether that changes. The Tropical Forest Forever Facility, launched in Brazil last year, plans to pay countries every year for each hectare of forest they preserve. It has secured $7.3 billion from governments, but payments are unlikely before 2028.
Strikingly, Brazil and Indonesia have each pledged $1 billion, while some wealthy donors committed only a few million dollars each. The South is already paying into the fund meant to pay it, which gives it a claim to shape the rules.
Why should Indonesia lead? It has put real money into the fund and sits on its board alongside Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It has a long record of working with Norway on forest payments, so it knows where such deals can go wrong.
And it has lessons to share with other forest countries, from granting villages legal rights to manage state forests to fighting peat fires. Indonesia can bring Southeast Asia into the conversation and act as a bridge between the Amazon and the Congo Basin.
Today, each forest country mostly negotiates alone. That lets donors set the terms and pits countries of the South against one another for the same small pot. A joint South-South position would change the balance and should address three issues.
The first is finance. Payments should be large enough to offset what a country gives up by not clearing its forest; they should arrive on time, and they should come as grants rather than loans that add to debt.
The second is safeguards that make sure forest money does not harm local people. The bloc should adopt a common set of rules, written by forest countries with their own communities and incorporating the fund’s promise to send 20% of payments to indigenous peoples and local communities. Standards written in the South would be harder for buyers in the North to ignore.
The third is fair pricing. The bloc should push for a minimum price for forest-protection results, so a tonne of pollution avoided in Borneo or the Congo isn’t valued at a fraction of a tonne cut in Europe.
South-South cooperation should also mean learning from each other, not only bargaining together. Brazil can share how it tracks forest loss by satellite, Congo Basin countries how they work with forest communities, and Indonesia what it learned about fires and land rights.
A bloc must also be honest at home. Its members must continue to reduce forest loss, respect land rights and publish their data.
COP31, the United Nations climate summit in Antalya, opens next month. Indonesia should use it to bring the forest countries of the South to a single table and a single position.
Together they hold the forests the world needs to fight climate change. They should also hold the pen when the rules for paying to protect them are written.
Bhima Yudhistira Adhinegara is the executive director of the Center of Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS), a Jakarta-based think tank. Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is the director of the China-Indonesia and MENA-Indonesia desks at CELIOS.
