By Happy Tarumadevyanto
Community-based Adaptation through Forest Management
Social Forestry is an option to promote sustainable forest management implemented in state-owned forest areas or private forests/customary forests where the local community or customary law community is the main actor to improve their welfare.
Social forestry is an important component of sustainable forest management. The socio-cultural role in forest development encourages fairer management in terms of benefit sharing. This role will involve village communities around the forest that have been managing the area in question for generations.
Appropriate practicalitySocial Forestry within the frame of Sound Forests Management will play an important role as providers of materials for sustainable life, maintaining and storing carbon emissions, and other environmental services. Thus, it is appropriate to increase and expand mitigation-based community activities through effective policies, strategies, and incentives.
Social forestry can contribute to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emission levels to support Indonesia’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) target in 2030. Therefore, the government must include social forestry in the scenario of achieving the NDC.
The contribution of social forestry is through efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation, and forest degradation, and increase carbon stocks. In short, social forestry is the implementation of a community-based climate project program (REDD+) at the site scale.
The social forestry policy officially started after the issuance of Minister of Environment and Forestry Regulation No 83 of 2016 concerning Social Forestry. The policy is designed to realize equitable access to land and natural resources, support aspects of people’s livelihoods as well as for the sustainability of forest resources.
The realization of social forestry as of September 2020 has reached 4.2 million hectares out of an allocation of 12.7 million hectares. Through social forestry, communities also have a stake and participate in climate change mitigation, especially in the land use, land use change, and forestry sectors.
The following are activities relevant to community-based approach mitigation:
- (1) Increasing public awareness of sound forest management to lead to appropriate forest management in order to reduce the global warming problem; Global warming is a global phenomenon that is triggered by human activities, especially those related to the use of fossil materials and land use change activities. This activity produces more and more gases in the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide (CO2) through a process called the greenhouse effect. The term greenhouse effect (greenhouse effect) is a term that is quite closely related to global warming.
- (2) Emphasizing the acceleration of deforestation and degradation that stimulates increased carbon emissions;
- (3) Increase the resilience of forests and their ecosystems for long-term mitigation developments;
- (4) Increasing reforestation activities (reforestation);
- (5) Promote sustainable forest management;
- (6) Increasing biodiversity and forest conservation