Nearly 20 million dollars of Indonesia's debt to the United States could be re-directed to tropical forestry conservation under a debt-for-nature program, the US embassy said Tuesday.
The US Treasury Department is to provide a 19.6 million dollar provisional allocation to be considered under the program with discussions toward an agreement due to begin in the coming weeks. "This is good news," Indonesia's minister of forestry Malam Sambat Kaban, who met with representatives from the embassy on Tuesday, said in the statement.
Once concluded, Indonesia will have one of the largest programs under the Tropical Forest Conservation Act (TFCA), the embassy said. Germany agreed to enter a similar program with Indonesia in May to protect three national parks in Sumatra. Indonesia's forests are recognised as some of the most biologically diverse in the world.
Greenpeace estimates that Indonesia has lost more than 72 percent of its intact ancient forests and much of the rest is threatened by commercial logging and clearance for palm oil plantations.
Comments
Comments are closed.