Indonesian Civil Society Demands Land Rights Recognition and Carbon Colonialism Audit Before COP31
Original framing: “Ahead of COP31 Antalya, WALHI Urges Government to Recognize Community Rights and Evaluate Problematic Carbon Projects” — bing news
Dayak, Papuan, and Orang Rimba communities manage forests through adat systems that encode biodiversity protection in spiritual-legal frameworks — e.g., the Dayak Benuaq's 'tana' ulen' (protected forest) institution predates national parks by generations. Carbon projects impose a Western property regime that makes these living governance systems illegible to state agencies, converting communal stewardship into 'additionality' claims for foreign buyers. The 2023 Constitutional Court ruling on customary forests remains a dead letter because the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (KLHK) controls the verification process.
WALHI's appeal before COP31 exposes the central contradiction of Indonesia's climate strategy: the state claims forest stewardship while legally enabling the financialization of customary territories through carbon markets that replicate colonial extraction.
The 2023 Constitutional Court ruling affirming adat rights remains unimplemented because KLHK controls both the mapping and the monetization — a structural conflict of interest that no UNFCCC side event can resolve. Cross-culturally, from Dayak tana' ulen to Māori tino rangatiratanga, Indigenous governance offers the only proven model for durable forest protection, yet carbon standards like Verra treat these systems as 'risks' to project viability. The trickster carbon credit reveals the absurdity: a financial instrument that claims to save forests by making them alienable property. Systemic repair requires not 'better safeguards' but a jurisdictional shift — adat communities as rights-holders, not stakeholders — with fossil phaseout as the non-negotiable precondition for any land-based climate action.