UNEP’s Tropical Landscapes Finance Facility secures investments in a bamboo agroforestry project in Indonesia, addressing the climate, biodiversity, and land degradation crises
Written by Fiona Cromarty
In East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, climate change is having observable effects on the environment, which is noticeably impacting the livelihoods of local communities. A farmer illustrates, “In the past, during the hot season we could still plant because it still rained, now there’s nothing. We can’t predict the rain and the heat now. The heat is extreme”. These observations are in line with scientific findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2021 Summary for Policymakers report that global heat extremes have increased while cold extremes have decreased, and these trends will continue over the coming decades.
In order to mitigate the impacts of climate change and sustain the livelihoods of communities, the United Nations Environment Programme’s Tropical Landscapes Finance Facility (TLFF) established the Tropical Landscapes Grant Fund (TLGF). The TLGF provides technical assistance and co-funds early-stage development costs of assets financed by the Lending Facility. On May 28th, 2021, this one-of-a-kind grant fund in Indonesia received funding of 4.8 million CAD from the Canadian Government under the Global Affairs Canada (GAC) grant.
“Canada's support of 4.8 million CAD will assess the environmental, social, and governance risks and opportunities, and increase the bankability of projects that stimulate green growth and improve rural livelihoods across Indonesia", stated by Ambassador of Canada to Indonesia and Timor-Leste, H.E. Cameron MacKay, in the webinar announcing the grant fund.
Canada’s monetary support will pave the way for new bankable projects that bring about positive environmental, social and economic impact in Indonesia, which can be seen through the TLGF’s investment in the Environmental Bamboo Foundation. This investment institutes impacts on a local and global scale.
Local impacts: The Environmental Bamboo Foundation
Founded in 1997 by the environmentalist and interior designer Linda Garland, the Environmental Bamboo Foundation aims to promote bamboo as a sustainable alternative to timber, amidst the growing concerns over the world’s diminishing tropical forest resources. To put this in perspective, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations finds that 144 million hectares, or 75% of Indonesia’s land area, is classified within forest boundaries, and nearly half of this land is managed for timber and forest production. The FAO also identifies that secondary forest products, such as plywood, timber, rattan, and paper make up Indonesia’s most important non-oil exports.
The Environmental Bamboo Foundation recognizes bamboo as a sustainable alternative, finding that Bamboo can have greater raw material yields at 10 - 30 per cent annual increase in biomass when compared with 5 per cent for typical trees in Indonesia. Additionally, if managed appropriately, bamboo continually regenerates and can grow in a wide variety of soils. The 4.8 million CAD investment from TLGF in the Environmental Bamboo Foundation provides support to rural farmers in producing and introducing this product into the market as a raw good, a fuel, or a low-impact building material, which in turn transforms their local community and creates sustainable village-level business.
Arief Rabik is a second-generation bamboo specialist (Linda Garland’s son), a board member of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and is the director of the Environmental Bamboo Foundation and founder of the organization’s ‘1,000 Bamboo Village initiative’. This initiative is working to initiate a forest-to-factory system, where 1,000 village-level bamboo nurseries will be established on degraded land to empower communities to efficiently manage and restore their landscape, standardize agroforestry practices, and create economic incentives that facilitate the expansion of bamboo markets and restoration economy. In Indonesia alone, the creation of the nationwide 1,000 ‘Bamboo Villages’ would result in an annual reduction of more than 100 million tons of CO2 emissions. This nature-based solution directly targets 12 of the 17 UNEP Sustainable Development Goals and will contribute to the achievement of the Nationally Determined Contributions of target countries.
A farmer in East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia demonstrates the value of the Bamboo Village to her family as she states, “Bamboo is a gift from our ancestors. I just have to plant it. So (that) we can safeguard it for my grandchildren’s future...and my grandchildren will live well”.
Success within this project has continued through the COVID-19 pandemic, which is attributed to the initiative’s focus on social aid programs that are part of the Indonesian Government’s COVID-19 relief packages. The initiative has received presidential recognition, initiated on-the-ground work in East Nusa Tenggara that is women-driven, and exceeded their bamboo planting targets.
“We’re not just planting bamboo; we’re planting a renewed understanding of nature” – Arief Rabik, Director of the Environmental Bamboo Foundation, founder of the Bamboo Village initiative, and member of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration Advisory board.
Global impacts: Additional investments, policies, and support are needed to reach the full potential of nature-based solutions
While the Bamboo Village initiative has made noteworthy and immense progress, there is a need for additional investments, policies, and regulatory government support to reach its full potential. For example, additional investments from institutional and private investors are needed to guide expansion from 200 bamboo villages mid-decade to the goal of 1,000 villages by 2029. Within the next five years, the Bamboo Village project aims to raise USD $1 billion and another USD $9 billion by the end of this decade. For this initiative to take hold, it also notes that a revised national strategy in Indonesia is needed with equivalents in other countries. Highlighting the achievements of this initiative demonstrate the potential for success within Nature-based Solutions (NbS) yet illustrate the critical need for a paradigm shift in current investments, regulations, and metrics for NbS-related projects and activities.
The systemic shifts identified by the Environmental Bamboo Foundation and their associated challenges are in parallel with the findings of the 2021 State of Finance for Nature report, published by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), that global investments in Nature-based solutions need to triple by 2030 and increase four-fold by 2050 from the current levels to tackle the interlinked climate, biodiversity, and land degradation crises. The report calls for a transformative change away from ‘Business-as-usual’, urging governments, financial institutions, and businesses to overcome this investment gap by placing nature at the heart of economic decision-making, and standardize investments in and tracking of nature-based solutions. The Bamboo Village initiative is one among many NbS projects that can be scaled up to address the triple planetary crisis.
As stated in the State of Finance for Nature in the G20 report, an analysis led by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the Economics of Land Degradation (ELD) Initiative hosted by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) in collaboration with Vivid Economics, in order to guide future investments, G20 nations - including Indonesia - could work to develop new and innovative investment products and nature markets, such as carbon finance, to protect and restore ecosystems, using blended finance structures to increase impactful investment in high nature value locations. Scaling up investments in the TLGF Grant fund and other initiatives can progress these social, economic, and environmental impacts through localized work.
Since 2021, first steps are being taken by the FAO and the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan (INBAR) to improve global reporting on bamboo. The objective is to develop a set of internationally recognized methodologies and technical tools to support bamboo cover, stock and carbon storage assessments. The overall aim is to improve knowledge about bamboo resources and build capacity for enhancing their climate change mitigation and livelihood development potential.
“Bamboo and rattan can make an important difference in the fight against climate change. Nature-based Solutions like bamboo do not just contribute to sustainable development, they also help build the kind of world we want” - Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The UN-REDD Programme is the United Nations collaborative initiative on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) in developing countries. The Programme supports national REDD+ readiness efforts in partner countries spanning Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America, in two ways: (i) direct support to the design and implementation of UN-REDD National Programmes; and (ii) complementary support to national REDD+ action through common approaches, analyses, methodologies, tools, data and best practices developed through the UN-REDD Global Programme.
The Tropical Landscapes Finance Facility (TLFF) aims to “leverage private finance for public good” by scaling up investment in renewable energy and landscapes resulting in enhancing the “Gross Domestic Product of the Poor” achieved through sustainable production of agricultural commodities, and improved smallholder productivity with reduced deforestation in Indonesia. The TLFF aims to bridge the gap between the government, private sector and communities, coordinating cross-functionally to bring about large-scale social impact and positive change in Indonesia.
