By Elaine Ganley, AP
Thu, Mar 11 2010
Source: mnn.com

Rich nations must contribute more to a climate change fund and help fight deforestation, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said at a conference Thursday on saving the world’s forests — a key defense against global warming.

Ministers from 64 nations attended the one-day meeting in Paris, including Indonesia and other heavily wooded countries in the Amazon and Congo river basins.

Efforts to halt deforestation, one of the culprits in climate change, have been bogged down along with the wider goal of reaching a legally binding global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions while helping poor nations adapt to and cope with climate change.

Thursday’s meeting, to be followed by a conference in May in Oslo, was focused on how to implement forest-preserving measures agreed on in principle at the last U.N. climate conference in December in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Specifically, nations need to work out how to disburse the $30 billion pledged by rich countries over the next three years. In total, world leaders agreed to spend $100 billion by 2020 to help poor nations preserve forests, protect coasts, adjust drought-threatened crops, build water supplies and irrigation systems, and adopt low-carbon energy options such as solar and wind power. French officials said they expected 20 percent of that to go to fighting deforestation.

Sarkozy said he wanted the Paris conference to bring more funding pledges for forests while working out how to organize the aid and find mechanisms to guarantee transparency. He said he wanted the private sector to join in, too.

Deforestation — through the burning of woodlands or the rotting of felled trees — is thought to account for up to 20 percent of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere — as much as that emitted by all the world’s cars, trucks, trains, planes and ships combined.

Due to deforestation from logging, crop-growing and cattle grazing, Indonesia and Brazil have become the world’s third- and fourth-largest carbon emitters, after China and the United States.

Sarkozy said defending the world’s forests demanded more aggressive funding.

“Those who don’t want to do anything are those who don’t want to pay,” he said in an opening address.

He reiterated his appeal for a tax on financial market transactions worldwide that could be earmarked for a global climate fund.

African ministers request more funds, faster action

Several African ministers complained that not enough money has been committed to the enormous and long-term task of fighting deforestation, and they said funds already pledged should be quickly released.

Numerous funding programs are in the works and individual countries are moving ahead with their own programs to fight deforestation and educate local populations who live off forests — estimated at more than 1 billion worldwide — to do so in a sustainable way.

“Lots of things are happening everywhere, but there is no visibility, no transparency, there is no pilot,” said France’s environment minister, Jean-Louis Borloo. “We need to know who is doing what and how.”

Managing and protecting forests must involve the people who live off them, Gabon Environment Minister Martin Mabala said.

“Forests are a planetary asset and no longer the concern of individual countries,” Mabala said.

Delegates to the Copenhagen conference did agree on a forest program known as REDD, for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, but a parallel program to protect tropical forests by having rich countries pay other nations concerned fell apart.

Thursday’s conference delegates were looking at an aspect of the REDD program, called REDD Plus, based on reducing emissions through good forest governance, protecting biological diversity and respect for the rights of indigenous people.

Six countries, including France and the other European leader on deforestation, Norway, have pledged $3.5 billion to the program through 2012.

Calling the Copenhagen conference “frustrating” in failing to reach a final deal, Sarkozy said the Paris delegates needed to advance what was agreed there to “give the world confidence” and “open the way to progress on other points” at the next global U.N. climate summit scheduled for December in Cancun, Mexico.

Indonesia is intensifying efforts to map forest areas nationwide using remote-sensing satellite technology, to maximize on their role in absorbing greenhouse gas emissions, a seminar has heard.

The announcement was made Wednesday at the start of the three-day symposium of the 4th Asia-Pacific Global on Earth Observation System in Bali.

Attending the event are delegations from 26 member states of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO).

The forest observations, being conducted by the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (Lapan), is aimed at collecting data on forest coverage and monitoring changes in the areas, including pinpointing fire hot spots.

Lapan remote-sensing unit deputy head Nur Hidayat said Indonesia had teamed up with Australia for the project.

“We’re looking to reduce the number of forest and peatland fires by 20 percent a year, so we’re continuously observing forests using remote-sensing satellite technology,” he said.

“The number of hot spots can now be monitored in real time.

“We’re intensifying our annual monitoring of forests to collect reliable and accurate data that can be used to calculate the forest’s capacity to absorb carbon emissions.”

Data collected by the agency will be used to draft a recommendation for follow-up action from other agencies, Hidayat said.

Indonesia is targeting to cut carbon emissions by 26 percent by 2020, or 2.95 gigatons of CO2, 14 percent of it to come from the forestry sector.

The country’s total forest cover is 98.5 million hectares, according to Forestry Ministry estimates. Islands with the highest coverage include Papua, which is 33 percent forest, and Kalimantan with 27.8 percent.

Lapan liaison director Ratih Dewanti Dimyati said the partnership with Australia was aimed at providing data on land changes for Indonesia’s National Carbon Accounting System (INCAS).

INCAS is a joint forest carbon partnership program between the two countries to support Indonesia in providing significant and cost-effective reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by reducing deforestation, encouraging reforestation and promoting sustainable forest management.

“We’re currently in the process of updating the previous data on forest areas nationwide, and we expect to complete it by the end of this year,” she said.

“However, because this is still the early stage of the observation, we can’t say conclusively if there has been any increase in deforestation or the number of hot spots.”

The agency’s will crosscheck its findings with those from the Australian team, to ensure the accuracy.

Forest fires are common across the country, particularly in Kalimantan and Sumatra.

The number of hot spots in Central Kalimantan has fluctuated wildly over the past 13 years, says the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) Indonesia.

In 2009, the figure was 4,860, up from 1,827 in the previous year and 2,793 in 2007.

Event Details

Every year there is a burning season in Indonesia. Areas of rainforest the size of Denmark are cut down and set alight by farmers and corporations to develop palm oil plantations. Not only is the habitat of critically endangered orangutans destroyed, but new scientific evidence also shows that deforestation comprises 20 percent of global carbon emissions, contributing significantly to climate change. The Burning Season is the story of a remarkable achievement by one young man not afraid to single-handedly confront the biggest challenge of our time. Dorjee Sun, a young entrepreneur, believes there’s money to be made from protecting rainforests in Indonesia, saving the orangutan from extinction and making a real impact on climate change. Armed with a laptop and a backpack, he sets out across the globe to find investors in his carbon-trading scheme. It is a battle against time, but Dorjee’s determination to succeed will uplift and entertain audiences and inspire hope in our future.

Narrated by Hugh Jackman. Directed by Cathy Henkel. Produced by Hatchling Productions in association with Films of Record.

Introduced by Geoffrey D. Dabelko, Director, Environmental Change and Security Program, Woodrow Wilson Center. Discussion with filmmaker Cathy Henkel follows screening.

Learn more

WASHINGTON: By delving deeper into the long calls of male Orangutans in Borneo, scientists have got new insight into how these solitary apes communicate through dense jungle.

The researchers conducted an acoustic analysis of the calls, and revealed that the calls not only serve to attract females, but also contain information on the identity and the context of the caller.

Led by Prof. Dr. Carel van Schaik from the University of Zurich, the researchers followed three sexually active male Organutans ‘Niko’, ‘Kentung’ and ‘Fugit’ from a nature reserve in Tuanan, Borneo.

The research area covered 750 hectares of heavily logged peat swamp forest where the average Orangutan density is 4.25 per square kilometre.

“Orangutans have a rich repertoire of calls, however only sexually mature, flanged males emit long-distance calls with a series of long booming pulses and grumbles which can be heard through over 1 km of dense jungle. Individual recognition is important in long distance communication when individuals are separated beyond visual contact, we examined whether individual identity and context were also encoded into a long call,” said co-author Dr Brigitte Spillmann.

They documented the behaviour of the three Orangutans each time they emitted a long call and their behaviour patterns were divided into two categories.

Frequently the males would emit spontaneous calls where there is no obvious prompt identified by the observers.

They would also call out in an aroused state in response to social prompts, such as another male’s long call, when a tree falls nearby and when the caller pushes over a tree themselves.

This tree pushing is known as ’snag crashing’, when the caller pushes over a dead tree in a noisy display of dominant behaviour, comparable to chest beating in Gorillas.

If a flanged male hears a tree falling nearby, it could suggest a rival male is ’snag crashing’ and can lead to a long call being given in response.

Long calls emitted in an aroused state are slightly faster, have pulses of shorter duration and contain more pulses and bubbles than spontaneously emitted calls.

After observing these categories of behaviour, the team also analysed how female Orangutans respond to the long calls.

They discovered that Bornean females recognise not only who is calling, as in previous research, but also clear differences in the acoustic characteristics of long calls emitted in different contexts.

The team monitored the responses between a calling male and a female who had heard the call but was not associated with the caller.

Females with dependent offspring moved away from spontaneous calls whereas a small sample of sexually active females seem to approach the caller.

When an aroused long call was heard females appeared to ignore the caller.

“This may be because in Borneo females with offspring and rival males are not the target of the spontaneous long calls, but are eavesdroppers. However the cost to the caller goes up if there is a more dominant male eavesdropper who may respond,” concluded Spillman.

“Long calls given in response to a disturbance are likely intended to repel rivals or potential predators, which accounts for the females’ lack of reaction compared to spontaneous long calls. Females are able to tell the difference between the types of long call and they react accordingly,” he added.

The study was published in Ethology.

Source: http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report_how-orangutans-communicate-through-dense-jungle_1357586

This article appeared in the March 22, 2010 edition of The Nation.

Why did America’s leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests–and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as “unworkable” and “unrealistic,” as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?

At first glance, these questions will seem bizarre. Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted “brands” in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world’s worst polluters–and burying science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed.

I have spent the past few years reporting on how global warming is remaking the map of the world. I have stood in half-dead villages on the coast of Bangladesh while families point to a distant place in the rising ocean and say, “Do you see that chimney sticking up? That’s where my house was… I had to [abandon it] six months ago.” I have stood on the edges of the Arctic and watched glaciers that have existed for millenniums crash into the sea. I have stood on the borders of dried-out Darfur and heard refugees explain, “The water dried up, and so we started to kill each other for what was left.”

While I witnessed these early stages of ecocide, I imagined that American green groups were on these people’s side in the corridors of Capitol Hill, trying to stop the Weather of Mass Destruction. But it is now clear that many were on a different path–one that began in the 1980s, with a financial donation.

Environmental groups used to be funded largely by their members and wealthy individual supporters. They had only one goal: to prevent environmental destruction. Their funds were small, but they played a crucial role in saving vast tracts of wilderness and in pushing into law strict rules forbidding air and water pollution. But Jay Hair–president of the National Wildlife Federation from 1981 to 1995–was dissatisfied. He identified a huge new source of revenue: the worst polluters.

Hair found that the big oil and gas companies were happy to give money to conservation groups. Yes, they were destroying many of the world’s pristine places. Yes, by the late 1980s it had become clear that they were dramatically destabilizing the climate–the very basis of life itself. But for Hair, that didn’t make them the enemy; he said they sincerely wanted to right their wrongs and pay to preserve the environment. He began to suck millions from them, and in return his organization and others, like The Nature Conservancy (TNC), gave them awards for “environmental stewardship.”

Companies like Shell and British Petroleum (BP) were delighted. They saw it as valuable “reputation insurance”: every time they were criticized for their massive emissions of warming gases, or for being involved in the killing of dissidents who wanted oil funds to go to the local population, or an oil spill that had caused irreparable damage, they wheeled out their shiny green awards, purchased with “charitable” donations, to ward off the prospect of government regulation. At first, this behavior scandalized the environmental community. Hair was vehemently condemned as a sellout and a charlatan. But slowly, the other groups saw themselves shrink while the corporate-fattened groups swelled–so they, too, started to take the checks.

Christine MacDonald, an idealistic young environmentalist, discovered how deeply this cash had transformed these institutions when she started to work for Conservation International in 2006. She told me, “About a week or two after I started, I went to the big planning meeting of all the organization’s media teams, and they started talking about this supposedly great new project they were running with BP. But I had read in the newspaper the day before that the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] had condemned BP for running the most polluting plant in the whole country…. But nobody in that meeting, or anywhere else in the organization, wanted to talk about it. It was a taboo. You weren’t supposed to ask if BP was really green. They were ‘helping’ us, and that was it.”

She soon began to see–as she explains in her whistleblowing book Green Inc.–how this behavior has pervaded almost all the mainstream green organizations. They take money, and in turn they offer praise, even when the money comes from the companies causing environmental devastation. To take just one example, when it was revealed that many of IKEA’s dining room sets were made from trees ripped from endangered forests, the World Wildlife Fund leapt to the company’s defense, saying–wrongly–that IKEA “can never guarantee” this won’t happen. Is it a coincidence that WWF is a “marketing partner” with IKEA, and takes cash from the company?

Likewise, the Sierra Club was approached in 2008 by the makers of Clorox bleach, who said that if the Club endorsed their new range of “green” household cleaners, they would give it a percentage of the sales. The Club’s Corporate Accountability Committee said the deal created a blatant conflict of interest–but took it anyway. Executive director Carl Pope defended the move in an e-mail to members, in which he claimed that the organization had carried out a serious analysis of the cleaners to see if they were “truly superior.” But it hadn’t. The Club’s Toxics Committee co-chair, Jessica Frohman, said, “We never approved the product line.” Beyond asking a few questions, the committee had done nothing to confirm that the product line was greener than its competitors’ or good for the environment in any way.

The green groups defend their behavior by saying they are improving the behavior of the corporations. But as these stories show, the pressure often flows the other way: the addiction to corporate cash has changed the green groups at their core. As MacDonald says, “Not only do the largest conservation groups take money from companies deeply implicated in environmental crimes; they have become something like satellite PR offices for the corporations that support them.”

It has taken two decades for this corrupting relationship to become the norm among the big green organizations. Imagine this happening in any other sphere, and it becomes clear how surreal it is. It is as though Amnesty International’s human rights reports came sponsored by a coalition of the Burmese junta, Dick Cheney and Robert Mugabe. For environmental groups to take funding from the very people who are destroying the environment is preposterous–yet it is now taken for granted.

This pattern was bad enough when it affected only a lousy household cleaning spray, or a single rare forest. But today, the stakes are unimaginably higher. We are living through a brief window of time in which we can still prevent runaway global warming. We have emitted so many warming gases into the atmosphere that the world’s climate scientists say we are close to the climate’s “point of no return.” Up to 2 degrees Celsius of warming, all sorts of terrible things happen–we lose the islands of the South Pacific, we set in train the loss of much of Florida and Bangladesh, terrible drought ravages central Africa–but if we stop the emissions of warming gases, we at least have a fifty-fifty chance of stabilizing the climate at this higher level. This is already an extraordinary gamble with human safety, and many climate scientists say we need to aim considerably lower: 1.5 degrees or less.

Beyond 2 degrees, the chances of any stabilization at the hotter level begin to vanish, because the earth’s natural processes begin to break down. The huge amounts of methane stored in the Arctic permafrost are belched into the atmosphere, causing more warming. The moist rainforests begin to dry out and burn down, releasing all the carbon they store into the air, and causing more warming. These are “tipping points”: after them, we can’t go back to the climate in which civilization evolved.

So in an age of global warming, the old idea of conservation–that you preserve one rolling patch of land, alone and inviolate–makes no sense. If the biosphere is collapsing all around you, you can’t ring-fence one lush stretch of greenery and protect it: it too will die. ……. (cont.)

Read the rest of the article and learn more on thenation.com.

The calls of male orangutans contain information about the apes’ identity and the context of the call, researchers say.

An international team of researchers, led by Carel van Schaik of the University of Zurich, tracked the behaviour and calls of three male orangutans on a nature reserve in Borneo’s Indonesian region.

While all orangutans have a wide variety of calls, only sexually mature male orangutans with enlarged cheek pads, or flanges, can make long-distance calls through the jungle.

Brigitte Spillmann of the University of Zurich described the calls as “a series of long, booming pulses and grumbles, which can be heard through over a kilometre of dense jungle.”

The researchers wanted to know whether these “long calls” contain information about the identity of the ape and the reason for the call.

“Individual recognition is important in long-distance communication when individuals are separated beyond visual contact. We examined whether individual identity and context were also encoded into a long call,” Spillmann said in a release.

The scientists observed the orangutans and recorded their behaviours each time they emitted a call. Their results were published this week in the journal Ethology.

Calls may be response

Some of the apes’ calls were spontaneous and not provoked by any obvious prompt. Other calls were in response to behaviours of other apes, such as another male’s long call or a tree falling nearby.

Orangutans will sometimes push over trees as part of a noisy, dominant display called snag crashing, similar to chest pounding in gorillas.

The researchers found that the orangutans’ pulsing calls in response to snag crashing or another male’s call were faster and consisted of more pulses of shorter duration than calls that were spontaneous.

The scientists also observed the behaviour of some female orangutans who heard the male apes’ calls.

Females with young offspring moved away from males making spontaneous calls, while sexually active females seemed to move toward them.

“This may be because in Borneo, females with offspring and rival males are not the target of the spontaneous long calls, but are eavesdroppers. However, the cost to the caller goes up if there is a more dominant male eavesdropper who may respond,” said Spillmann.

The females who heard the calls that were in response to another male’s behaviour ignored them.

“Long calls given in response to a disturbance are likely intended to repel rivals or potential predators, which accounts for the females’ lack of reaction, compared with spontaneous long calls. Females are able to tell the difference between the types of long call and they react accordingly,” said Spillmann.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/03/09/tech-biology-orangutan-call.html

A DENTIST carried out an unusual operation at Colchester Zoo recently – removing three teeth from the attraction’s most-famed animal.

West End dentist Peter Kertesz travelled to Colchester to aid Rajang the Orangutan, who is 41-years-old, and greets all visitors to the zoo as they walk in. While Mr Kertesz specialises in treating animals at zoos all over the world, he also treats human patients at his London clinic.

Curator Clive Barwick said: “Despite being very sleepy afterwards, Rajang, has made a full recovery from the operation over the weekend.

“He is the grand old age of 41 so there was naturally some concern in carrying out the procedure so we’re really happy with how it’s all gone.”

Source: http://www.eveningstar.co.uk/

The government has just issued two new regulations on forests, which could allow protected forests to be used for commercial purposes, including long-banned mining activities.

Under the regulations, conservation forests could also be converted to production forests, to be used for plantations of trees such as acacia.

“We are now waiting for a presidential decree to bring the regulations into force. A number of firms have applied for mining permits in protected forest areas,” a senior official at the Forestry Ministry, Bambang Mulyo, said Monday.

The government regulation No. 24 on the use of forest areas says mining firms can dig for natural resources deposited under protected and production forests.

Article 5 of the regulation stipulates that in protected areas, miners are only allowed to conduct underground mining that does not change the forest functions.

However, in production forests miners could use both open pit and underground mining techniques.
Indonesia currently has 31.6 million hectares of the protected forests, of which 10.6 million hectares is in Papua province.

The second-largest area of protected forests is in East Kalimantan (2.7 million hectares) and West Kalimantan (2.3 million hectares).

The government has allotted some 22.7 million hectares for production land that could be converted for business uses.

The 1999 Law on Forestry strongly prohibits mining activities in protected forest areas, be it open pit or underground mining. Under this law, mining is only allowed in production forest areas.

Former president Megawati Soekarnoputri issued a decree to grant special licenses to 13 giant mining firms to operate open-pit mines in protected forest areas.

Among the 13 are PT Aneka Tambang in Southeast Sulawesi, PT Freeport Indonesia in Mimika, Papua, Karimun Granit in Riau, INCO in Sulawesi, Natarang Mining in Lampung, Nusa Halmahera Mineral in North Maluku, Pelsart Tambang Kencana in South Kalimantan, Interex Sacra Raya in East and South Kalimantan and Weda Bay Nickel in North Maluku.

Regulation No. 24 also stipulates that protected forests may now be used for non-forestry businesses serving strategic purposes.

“We will elaborate on these strategic goals with the Environment Ministry and the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry,” Bambang said.

Greenomics Indonesia executive director Elfian Effendi warns that a blurred definition of strategic goals could mean more areas of protected forests are cleared in the name of development.

“The government needs to impose a moratorium on new permits for mining firms conducting open-pit mining in forest areas,” he said.

In addition to the mining sector, the ministry issued regulation No. 10 that allows for protected and conservation forests to be converted to production land, the first ever such policy in Indonesia.
Critics say the regulation may lead to open-pit mining in protected forest areas.

Bambang, however, said he would not allow this to happen. “While there are minerals deposited under the production land, license holders are not allowed to dig them up,” he said.

The government has long faced international pressure to improve its management of forests, with the current rate of deforestation at more than 1 million hectares a year.

Indonesia plans to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 percent by 2020, of which 14 percent would be from stopping deforestation, combating illegal logging and controlling forest fires.

The government also pledged to plant 1 billion trees this year to re-green the country’s millions of hectares of degraded forest land.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his United States counterpart President Barack Obama are slated to talk on climate change issues, and aiming to set up the first regional climate center in Indonesia. Under the plan, Indonesia will become a hub for scientific data and a training center on climate change issues for five countries in Southeast Asia — Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei Darussalam, the Philippines and Indonesia — and 17 nations in the Pacific, including Australia, New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, Timor Leste and Fiji.

“We hope the US will provide technical assistance, financing and technology transfer facilities to support the establishment of the regional center on climate change in Indonesia,” Yudhoyono’s special assistant on climate change Agus Purnomo said Monday. Obama, who spent a small part of his childhood in Jakarta, will visit the country this month.

Agus, who is also the National Council on Climate Change (DNPI) secretary, said the regional center would be a hub for climate information especially on issues related to oceans and forests as well as on mitigation and adaptation programs. He said Obama and Yudhoyono would also discuss a comprehensive partnership on capacity building and technology transfer to help more accurate forecasting of climate phenomenon in Indonesia. “We are in dire need of such technology to help us make more accurate forecasts on climate phenomenon. Many natural disasters — floods, landslides and harvest failures — in Indonesia reflected that without adequate technology it was harder to forecast events due to climate change,” he said.

Head of the climate change division at the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) Advin Aldrian said Indonesian officials, chaired by the Research and Technology Ministry, had visited Washington to discuss cooperation. “We have made a draft proposal to be submitted during Obama’s visit,” he said without elaborating. “However, the government plans to conduct more scientific research on oceans and forests and their role in climate change. The United States has increased their support to help us in this research,” he added. Indonesia led the way by formally tabling issues on oceans and climate change in Copenhagen last year.

During the global environment ministerial meeting in Bali last week, Yudhoyono was given an award by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) for his leadership in promoting ocean and marine conservation and management. The US has provided financial assistance to implement the Coral Triangle Initiative agreed in the Manado summit last year. In terms of forestry, the US has provided funds to protect the forest including through the debt-for-nature scheme.

Both Indonesia and the US are currently negotiating a second deal in the debt-for-nature scheme by which funds would be used to help conserve forest areas in Indonesia. The two countries signed the first debt-for-nature deal last June, swapping US$30 million of Indonesia’s debt that could then be used to conserve around 7 million hectares of forest in Batang Gadis National Park in North Sumatra, Bukit Tigapuluh National Park in Central Sumatra and Way Kambas National Park in Lampung.

Indonesia and Malaysian palm oil producers have agreed to jointly tackle challenging environmental and labor issues which threaten to hinder the development of the industry in both countries.

Producers have lately come under attack on a number of fronts. Environmentalists complain the growth of palm oil plantations contributes to deforestation, threatens wildlife and increases greenhouse gas emissions, while there has also been criticism of the industry’s use of underage labor.

Late on Friday, Indonesia and Malaysian signed a memorandum of understanding in which they agreed to collaborate and improve communication between producers in both countries to counter the impact of critics of the industry and also to improve sustainability.

“Through collaboration, hopefully we can face the negative campaign [against the industry] and the accusations of environmental damage,” said Indonesia’s Agriculture Minister Suswono, after the signing ceremony.

The world’s top palm oil producers, Indonesia and Malaysia together account for about 85 percent of global output.

Suswono cited Unilever’s suspension last year of palm oil purchases from PT Smart, after a report from Greenpeace which claimed the company did not use sustainable production processes, as an example of the type of situation where the industry would benefit from enhanced cooperation.

“It’s not fair,” he said. “In the future, if there are any accusations, we will immediately form an independent team to inspect the case. So that we, palm oil producers, will have a stronger bargaining position than the buyer.”

As part of the coordination efforts, six palm oil industry associations from Indonesia and Malaysia on Friday signed a memorandum of collaboration that will, among other things, establish a steering committee to advise the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, an organization that issues certificates to palm oil producers that comply with certain environmental standards. A number of major palm oil buyers do not buy from companies that lack the certification.

Under the memorandum of collaboration, producers are also encouraged to develop sustainable plantation practices, including restoring land after it has been used for palm oil plantations.

Malaysian Plantation Industries and Commodities Minister Tan Sri Bernard Giluk Dompok said environmental issues were being increasingly used to attack the palm oil industrys.

“There is no reason for palm oil producers in the two countries to not to cooperate and discuss issues of common interest,” he said.

Dato’ Mamat Salleh, the Malaysian Palm Oil Association’s chief executive, said the industry would face increased environmental challenges in the future.

One hurdle for the water-intensive industry was the development of so-called water footprints, a measure used to show how much water is used in the production of palm oil, he said.

“There will be new environmental issues, which could make palm oil plantations become more controversial in the future,” Dato said. “We need fair scientific research so that we can also improve our plantations,” he said.

Indonesian Palm Oil Producers Association (Gapki) chairman Joefly J Bachroeny said the cooperation efforts were also aimed at helping Indonesian and Malaysian palm oil producers to improve sustainability.