Andika Putraditama

In places like Indonesia, the biggest source of carbon emissions are actually coming from the loss of our forests and the burning of the peatland.

That is this really carbon-rich ecosystem that is made up of dead organic matters, accumulated over thousands of years.

Globally, the agriculture, the forest and the land use sectors actually contribute to around a fifth of the global emission, which is significant, right?

So there's no viable pathway for us to really mitigate climate change without really stopping the loss of our forests and without actually starting protecting this massive natural carbon sink that is our peatland, our mangroves.

But what's causing the loss of this critical ecosystem?

Well, it's actually the productions of commodities that we use every day.

Things like timber or palm oil that is so ubiquitous that there's a good chance when you walk to your local supermarket stores, almost all products in the shelves have something to do with palm oil, one way or another.

But it also tells you that

This product, this commodity is so prevalent, it's so embedded in our daily life, in our daily economy, that completely taking out the production and the consumption of it might not be realistic at all.

And so companies have recognized the dilemma, and they've introduced policies such as the no deforestation policy.

And what it does is that it dictates them to really make sure that the palm oil that they're buying is not contributing to forest loss.

which is a good start.

But that's only one side of the coin.

The other side of the coin is that if you really want to have a nature-positive outcome out of this, is that you have to start proactively protecting the existing forest and restoring those who we have lost.

And here's the bad news.

Forest conservation financing is massively underfunded.

the mitigation actions under the agriculture, forest and land use is severely underfunded, that it only receives around less than four percent of the total global climate financing.

And this is the problem that we're trying to solve with a mechanism called the RIMBA collective.

So I have a political science background as well as a forest science background, and I've spent the majority of my career working with the governments, companies in Southeast Asia and civil society to reduce the impact of the commodity supply chain.

And what RIMBA collective mechanism allows us to do is it lets the company to contribute funds to protect and restore the natural ecosystem proportionate to their raw material impact.