Ketapang Community Carbon Pools, West Kalimantan, Indonesia

Ketapang Community Carbon Pools (KCCP) is part of the Southeast Asia Community Carbon Pools initiative managed by Fauna and Flora International (FFI) Indonesia Programme. Situated in Ketapang district of West Kalimantan, the goals of KCCP are to conserve the habitat of the endangered Bornean orangutan (Pongo Pygmaues wurmbii) (Rawson 2013) and to reduce GHG emissions. The core strategy is to secure community tenure rights and strengthen forest governance. The forest landscape of Ketapang is both highly threatened and biodiversity rich (FFI–Indonesia Programme 2009). The forests are mostly managed under customary law by local Dayak and Malay communities, but are formally part of the forest zone (kawasan hutan), which is under the purview of the State (see Box H). The lowland and peat swamp forests within KCCP areas are primarily threatened by: illegal and unsustainable logging; conversion to oil palm plantations; the establishment of timber plantations, which often begins through clear cutting of natural forests; mining; and the development of plantation crops (sugar cane). Threats to forests in KCCP come from large-scale external actors and from within the area, i.e. from small-scale activities such as swidden agriculture and forest fires (uncontrolled burning for land clearing) carried out by members of the community themselves (personal communication from KCCP senior staff, 2013; Wati 2014). To fend off large-scale external actors, the initiative is seeking first to obtain hutan desa (HD, or village forest) tenure status for these villages, that is, community management rights over village forests situated within the forest zone (kawasan hutan), before advancing to REDD+. Thus, KCCP seeks to integrate a top down policy (i.e. internationally-driven REDD+ embraced by the national government) and a bottom-up initiative (i.e. the HD process initiated at the village level). Seven villages are currently participating in KCCP.