Committee: UNDELC

Country: Indonesia
Topic: Compensatory Mitigation in a Global Context

Past and Current International Action:

Despite being a relatively young global issue, environmentalism has had a major impact

on international policies in the decades since it was first brought to the international

community’s attention with the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, or the

Stockholm Accords in 1972 (Boudes, 2014). This was the first UN conference that focused on

the environment and reflected a growing worldwide awareness of the problem, and even at such

an early point in the movement’s history, principles 8, 9, and 10 of the declaration that resulted

from the conference conceded that though environmental protection was key, in many countries,

especially developing nations, “stability of prices and adequate earnings for primary

commodities and raw materials are essential to environmental management, since economic

factors as well as ecological processes must be taken into account” (“Declaration of the United

Nations Conference on the Human Environment”).

The occasionally conflicting interests of conservation and economic development, as

acknowledged at the Stockholm Accords, were one of the first and most prevalent barriers to

legislating environmental protection, since this often ran counter to private and public interests.

Business expansion, the construction of infrastructure, and city development all usually came at

the expense of the natural environment, leading the United States of America to create the

system known as compensatory mitigation in the Clean Water Act of 1972 (“History of the

Clean Water Act”). Besides sweeping changes to the United States’ environmental policy,

Section 404 of the Act specified that any potentially damaging activity in a wetland would have

to be minimized as much as possible and that compensation would be provided for unavoidable

damages (“Section 404”). These rules were expanded as recently as 2008 to include more
Committee: UNDELC
Country: Indonesia
Topic: Compensatory Mitigation in a Global Context

comprehensive guidelines, specifying the different forms of mitigation and where these different

types were to be applied (“Compensatory Mitigation for Losses of Aquatic Resources; Final

Rule).

Since the initial Clean Water Act, different nations have used the principles of

compensatory mitigation to inform their own environmental efforts while protecting economic

interests. Slovenia has used mitigation policies in regards to construction in their cave systems,

Costa Rica uses mitigation to promote a future carbon-free economy, and Austria’s national

environmental program is largely based around punitive measures against polluters that require

compensation of the natural surroundings equal to the damage inflicted (“Cave Conservation

Act”) (Mora, 2007: n.p.) (Schmelz, 2012: n.p.).

However, much of the legal groundwork that has been established in the recent decades

in compensatory mitigation has largely been made by individual nations, despite the growing

role of international bodies in influencing environmental legislation on a global scale. The most

recent Montevideo summit, a meeting hosted by the United Nations Environmental Programme

of senior government officials specializing in environmental law, noted that internationally, the

industries of energy, transportation, and agriculture were in need of mitigation strategies due to

the environmental damage they were causing (“Report of the Meeting of [. . .] Periodic Review

of Environmental Law”). Many international governing bodies focused on environmentalism

take general direction from the most recent Montevideo Programme at the time, making the

wording of this summit extremely valuable. Though compensatory mitigation has not yet been a

defining feature of international environmentalism, the statements made at the programme

Committee: UNDELC
Country: Indonesia
Topic: Compensatory Mitigation in a Global Context

suggest a shift in the international community’s practices in terms of protecting the natural

world.

Country’s Position:

Indonesia has a somewhat checkered history in terms of the environment. This is

significant due to the immense biodiversity that the archipelago is home to, with up to 3,305

known species of amphibians, birds, mammals, and reptiles and at least 29,375 species of

vascular plants are endemic to the islands, all of which makes up around 40% of the biodiversity

of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.

Likely as a result of this biodiversity, Indonesia has seen several local environmental

movements and groups along the years, alongside the mounting pressure of the international

community. One source of this has been Indonesia’s large Muslim community, which has taken a

religious stand against unchecked depletion of the islands’ forests (Bahrawi, 2009: n.p.). This

grassroots movement has been of particular note in the past years because it has occurred largely

without prodding from UN bodies or similarly international organizations. The two largest such

groups, Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulam (NU), are both involved in the creation of

environmental programmes to spread awareness of the nation’s failures in sustainability, and the

NU has become directly involved with the country’s national ministry of forestry to battle

unrestricted loggers in the islands.

The unique ecosystems of Indonesia have also attracted interest from both domestic

activists and foreigners. The Leuser Ecosystem, for instance, is home to the endangered

Sumatran orangutans and allows them to live in peace alongside elephants, rhinoceroses, and
Committee: UNDELC
Country: Indonesia
Topic: Compensatory Mitigation in a Global Context

tigers, which has led several key members of government to attempt to categorize the region as

off-limits to human interference (Schonhardt, 2013: n.p.).

All of these seem to suggest that the Indonesian people as a whole are supportive of

greater ecological protection of their country’s biodiversity. Despite these intentions, the country

is still one of the world’s leading polluters in water and air, and in the past 50 years has managed

to reach almost 40% deforestation (“Top 5 Most Polluting Countries”).

Indonesian government officials generally state that this environmental sacrifice is

necessary for the nation to continue to develop economically and remain competitive in the

global market for the sake of their constituents. An example of this form of thinking took place

in the Aceh province, in the north of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. It had become distinctive

in the past decade for separatist conflict and natural disasters, which had held back economic

development but helped preserve an incredibly rich local ecosystem.

A considerable history of rebellion in the area was curtailed in 2005 when a peace

accords between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement, a powerful

separatists group, had been signed. A former rebel, Irwandi Yusuf, served as governor from 2007

to 2012, a period when he was well-known for a strict stance against logging corporations and

deforestation. He backed up his position by supporting the United Nations Collaborative

Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing

Countries, or the UN-REDD Programme, a carbon-trading plan that put a heavy emphasis on

mitigating the human damages made to the environment (“Our Work Programme”). This clearly

demonstrated the political will within Indonesia to support green change, especially since Yusuf

had explicitly run as a “green governor” (Schonhardt, 2013: n.p.).

Committee: UNDELC
Country: Indonesia
Topic: Compensatory Mitigation in a Global Context

However, in 2011, Governor Yusuf began to change his attitude, and that of the region’s

local government, towards corporate development in relation to the environment by allowing a

palm oil company to develop a peat swamp inside the Tripa conservation zone, one of the homes

of the endangered Sumatran orangutan. His successor worked to revise legislation from 2000 and

make Indonesian land more accessible to businesses, despite conservationists complaining that

those actions threatened the fragile ecosystems in the area (Schonhardt, 2013: n.p.).

These changes in government policies came about mainly as a result of economic and

developmental factors. Governor Yusuf had supported the conservationists’ efforts as long as

they seemed to coincide with the continuing development of the nation through the UN’s

carbon-trading plan. When this plan failed to sufficiently benefit the Aceh region, Yusuf returned

to more traditional, but more destructive, means of national development. Although

environmentally unsustainable, in a country whose attention has been focused on “economic

nationalism, corruption and how to build more roads and ports,” especially recently, the move to

many seemed like the best option for the country (“A Sorry Record on Deforestation”).

If the Aceh region has rejected the sustainable model of the growth, however, the nation

as a whole seems more likely to accept the idea. The president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, has

pledged to cut carbon emissions by at least 26% by 2020, and in 2013, the government approved

Rimba Raya, the world’s largest UN REDD project, which the Aceh region had rejected

(“World's Largest [. . .] in Indonesia”). Admittedly, the President has also stated a goal to make

the country one of the top ten economies in the world by 2025 and has a history of ignoring

environmental costs in favor of economics in times of pressure. In addition, the country’s

Committee: UNDELC
Country: Indonesia
Topic: Compensatory Mitigation in a Global Context

forestry ministry is widely seen as corrupt by the Indonesian people, all of which represent

challenges the nation will need to face as it moves into the future (“Logging the Good News”).

Proposed Solutions:

As seen in Indonesia’s history, and in fact, in the history of many developing countries,

the nation’s primary barrier to reaching a sustainable level of development, as compensatory

mitigation attempts to create, is that it conflicts with the nation’s economic growth and makes

sustainable development seem unappealing to developing countries.

As a result, a global compensatory mitigation economy is needed to ensure that using

such an economic model is sufficiently beneficial to a member nation’s economy to be

appealing. This would first need to be done by helping member nations of a global compensatory

mitigation economy draw up legislation that adapts the principles of compensatory mitigation to

each individual nation’s situation. This is a necessity in the UN due to the variety of countries

that are part of the organization, covering a wide range of economic growth rates, GDP’s,

average incomes, and states of infrastructure, all of which would affect how reasonable a

compensatory mitigation policy would be in that country.

Second, there must be provisions to alter these legislations as a country progresses. To

this end, the UNDELC should set up a committee of legislators, financial experts, and

environmentalists that will review the condition of each nation that takes part in the

compensatory mitigation economy, and reviews each country again every five years to account

for economic growth or decline. In this manner, a government can be expected to work with

legislation that accurately reflects the financial resources at its disposal.

Committee: UNDELC
Country: Indonesia
Topic: Compensatory Mitigation in a Global Context

Third, some effort should be made to make this system of compensatory mitigation truly

international in scope and use this to foster closer ties between countries. In other words, certain

countries are in greater need of mitigation, while others are in greater need of development.

Provisions should be made to account for the possibility in the future that compensatory

mitigation may cross national boundaries. For instance, a company that performs construction in

a country that is still developing could provide mitigation efforts in another country that has

already reached the developed stage and is in a position to safely worry about conservation.

To this end, the UNDELC should also establish a global, unified system of mitigation

credits. These credits could be spent across borders and would be crucial in the international

system of multilateral compensatory mitigation detailed above. It would also provide a

convenient framework for comparing different countries’ developments and environmental

gains, and could become part of a more unified global economy, as mitigation credits are used by

corporations to cross borders more frequently and establish ties in other countries. This could be

used as a tool of policy to foster stronger relationships between nations by giving countries

control over where there corporations are allowed to carry out mitigation efforts.

The described system of mitigation credits should be made part of a greater international

system of financial incentives to persuade more countries to join in the compensatory mitigation

economy. Countries whose products do not meet environmentally safe standards ought to be

placed under tariffs among nations that follow the compensatory mitigation guidelines, making

sustainable practices more economically sound than unsustainable practices.

Similarly, the World Bank and other international pecuniary organizations should limit

the loans made to developing countries to countries that follow compensatory mitigation
Committee: UNDELC
Country: Indonesia
Topic: Compensatory Mitigation in a Global Context

guidelines, allowing for easier growth and construction in developing countries. These countries,

once they are economically tied to the United Nations’ loans, can be further induced to remain in

this global economy. In addition, oversight of microloans would force the countries involved in

this system into greater transparency, giving the UNDELC an opportunity to ascertain the

veracity of their claims of environmental sustainability.

Questions to Consider:

2. What are the best characteristics of biodiversity offsetting systems and compensatory

mitigation economies that should be promoted in order to optimize for the benefits mentioned

above?

The best characteristics of these systems and economies are that, rather than interfering with a

nation’s economic growth and development, they instead promote the increasing sustainability of

the environment alongside business expansion by tying the goals of conservation to the corporate

interests of those developing the landscape and natural world. This makes such a system

particularly appealing to developing nations that cannot afford losses in the business sector

without losing crucial ground when trying to catch up to developed nations that can more readily

afford to bear the losses of simpler conservation strategies that only limit areas of corporate

expansion. In addition, strategies of carbon abatement and carbon crediting that use the same

units of exchange could be applied to make build closer economic ties between nations, which

might help foster trade agreements and mutual friendships in several years.

6. Is it more beneficial to provide a “fill in the blank” type legislation that countries can adopt

and adapt to their situation or a set of rules and guidelines that regional systems would need to

comply with the standards of a global system?

Committee: UNDELC
Country: Indonesia
Topic: Compensatory Mitigation in a Global Context

It is more beneficial to provide a “fill in the blank” type legislation that countries can adopt and

adapt to their situation than a global set of rules and guidelines. Admittedly, a global set of

guidelines would be more effective in unifying the world’s environmental actions, and would

make comparisons between different countries’ conservation efforts simpler with the same basic

model to work with. However, this unification is still an ineffective system because the

conservation efforts that different nations are capable of are simply not equal. Some nations have

more disposable income and government resources that can be expended on the problems of

falling biodiversity and ecosystem loss. Other nations, in contrast, simply cannot afford the

losses that strict curtailing of internal improvements might bring about, especially when that

might harm the citizenry of a country. In addition, different nations have different levels of

environmental need. Some countries hold fewer environmentally indispensable ecosystems, such

as systems with endangered species, while others are unable to develop without eventually

having to develop in the natural environment. These differing requirements necessarily call for

similarly differentiated guidelines in mitigating a country’s growth.

Committee: UNDELC
Country: Indonesia
Topic: Compensatory Mitigation in a Global Context

Bibliography:

“A Sorry Record on Deforestation.” ​The Economist​, The Economist Newspaper, 2 July 2014,

www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2014/07/indonesia-and-environment​.

Bahrawi, Nazry. “Helping Islam's Green Shoots Grow.” ​The Guardian​, Guardian News and

Media, 17 Nov. 2009,

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/nov/17/islam-indonesian-muslims-reli

gious-environmentalism​.

Boudes, Philippe. “United Nations Conference on the Human Environment.”​Encyclopædia

Britannica​, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 15 Sept. 2014,

www.britannica.com/topic/United-Nations-Conference-on-the-Human-Environment​.

Cave Conservation Act.​ Ljubljana, The Republic of Slovenia, 2003.

Compensatory Mitigation for Losses of Aquatic Resources; Final Rule ​. Washington, D.C.,

United States Environmental Protection Agency and United States Army Corps of

Engineers, 2008.

“Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment.” ​United Nations

Environment Programme​, United Nations Environment Programme, 16 June 1972,

www.unep.org/documents.multilingual/default.asp?documentid=97&articleid=1503​.

“History of the Clean Water Act.” ​EPA​, Environmental Protection Agency, 25 May 2016,

www.epa.gov/laws-regulations/history-clean-water-act​.

“Logging the Good News.” ​The Economist​, The Economist Newspaper, 25 May 2013,

www.economist.com/news/asia/21578441-president-has-helped-transform-debate-about-f

orest-conservation-logging-good-news​.
Committee: UNDELC
Country: Indonesia
Topic: Compensatory Mitigation in a Global Context

Mora, Roberto Dobles. “Costa Rica's Commitment: On The Path To Becoming Carbon-Neutral |

UN Chronicle.” ​United Nations Chronicle​, United Nations, June 2007,

unchronicle.un.org/article/costa-rica-s-commitment-path-becoming-carbon-neutral.

“Our Work Programme.” ​UN-REDD Programme​, United Nations,

www.un-redd.org/work-programme​.

Report of the Meeting of Senior Government Officials Expert in Environmental Law on the

Midterm Review of the Fourth Programme for the Development and Periodic Review of

Environmental Law.​ Montevideo, United Nations Environment Programme, 2015.

Schonhardt, Sara. “In Indonesia, Environmentalists See a Disaster in the Making.” ​The New York

Times,​ The New York Times, 11 Oct. 2013,

www.nytimes.com/2013/10/12/world/asia/in-indonesia-environmentalists-see-a-disaster-i

n-the-making.html​.

Schmelz, Christian, et al. “Environmental Law and Practice in Austria: Overview.” ​Practical

Law​, Thomson Reuters Corporation, 1 Oct. 2012, us.practicallaw.com/6-503-1951.

“Section 404.” ​An Act to Amend the Federal Water Pollution Control Act,​ United States

Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C., 1972, pp. 253–306.

“Top 5 Most Polluting Countries.” ​Sustainability for All,​ Acciona,

www.activesustainability.com/top-5-most-polluting-countries​.

“World's Largest Redd Project Finally Approved in Indonesia.” ​Guardian Environment Network​,

Guardian News and Media, 31 May 2013,

www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/may/31/worlds-largest-redd-project-indonesia​.