Andika Putraditama

Putting five dollars per hectare on the table is enough to call it conservation.

Some of them might think that I'm in it for the next three years, and then I'm out.

All of those

are wildly, wildly unrealistic.

Some of these projects, they have to buy motorbikes.

They have to buy cars to patrol the area.

Some even have to build watchtowers in the middle of nowhere.

Multiple watchtowers.

And some of our projects, they need to build dams to start regulating the water table when they're restoring the peatland ecosystem.

And of course, all of that requires a significant amount of investment.

And so what's the ideal way forward for us?

Well, first thing is that we need to change the perception that the protections and the restorations of our natural ecosystem should just be a charity project.

It shouldn't be.

The products that you use every day, maybe the shampoo that you used this morning, might not reflect the true environmental cost behind them.

The forests that were lost to grow the ingredients that goes in it, or the carbon that was lost and will not be absorbed in the future because the trees are no longer there.

And so by linking these metrics of procurement of raw commodities directly to the conservation financing,

we should be able to recapture that externality cost and redirect that to the conservation of our natural ecosystem.

And our goal is big.

Conserving and restoring 500,000 hectares of forest is ambitious.

But that's just a fraction of what we need to do right now.