Supporting enhanced climate ambition and action in Indonesia

Workstream:

Enhancing NDC ambitions with mitigation in the agriculture sector

Ongoing

started:

2020

Indonesia's agriculture sector is responsible for 7.8% of the country’s greenhouse emissions, of which 34% comes from rice cultivation, 26% are direct emissions from land and soil management, 13% from enteric fermentation, and 25% from other emission sources.

We are funding demonstration projects in Indonesia to illustrate how institutional strengthening, improved institutional linkages and assessment tools can help set ambitious mitigation targets. These activities are designed to provide regionally-relevant examples that can be replicated throughout the South East Asia region.

Objectives

Our Agriculture Initiative is working in Indonesia, as well as many other countries around the world, to:

Engage relevant actors and enhance their capacity to promote methane mitigation actions that align with sustainable development goals (SDGs)
Help countries integrate methane quantification and mitigation into existing and planned livestock sector strategies, investments and policies
Enhance capacity in countries to secure climate finance in support of transformative action.

Why we're doing this work

Ruminant livestock produce about 6 megatonnes (Mt) of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-eq) in methane annually, of which the FAO estimates approximately 500 Mt CO2-eq can be mitigated through practices that increase productivity at the individual animal and herd level. If nothing is done, global livestock-related greenhouse gas emissions are expected to rise by 25-40% by 2050.

At COP23 in Bonn, countries adopted a decision on agri-food systems that will lead to the implementation of policies to address both climate change and food security. They established the “Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture” (KJWA) to develop and implement new strategies for adaptation and mitigation within the agriculture sector. These strategies aim to reduce emissions from the sector and build resilience to climate change impacts. The agreement is the first substantive outcome and COP decision in the history of the UNFCCC processes on agriculture. With Paris Agreement commitments and the KJWA decision in place, countries must produce (at least Tier 2) baselines for agricultural emissions to support their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs); develop tools to support Monitoring, Verification and Reporting (MRV); and put in place context-specific plans and policies to access climate finance.

Despite such aspirations and obligations, accounting and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by signatory countries to the Paris Agreement remains challenging. While many countries’ NDCs broadly recognize the role of agriculture in climate change mitigation and adaptation, such ambition is not generally reflected in the programs and targets they have set. As countries work to update and turn their NDCs from plans into action, many lack the capacity, finance, and technical know-how to achieve this on their own.

What we're doing

The Coalition is funding work to strengthen institutional capacity, enhance stakeholder participation and awareness, and improve understanding of the potential for methane mitigation in NDCs and other policy planning processes.

Project activities include:

Conducting stakeholder assessments and network analysis
Organizing multi-stakeholder policy events to build broad awareness and consensus around project objectives
Identifying supportive policies and programmes and flag potential barriers to mitigation at scale
Carry out assessments to identify the policy gaps, needs, and actions to set policies that achieve national goals
Develop plans to strengthen enabling environments and determine financial needs

This work in Indonesia will link to a project co-funded by New Zealand and the Indonesian Agency for Agricultural Research and Development focused on developing an improved Tier 2 beef livestock inventory and testing local feed sources for methane mitigation potential. The project will pilot the development and testing of low emitting dairy systems via improved grassland and animal management.