Mina Setra remembers a time before oil palm plantations changed the landscape of her childhood home. Setra, an Indigenous Dayak Pompakng, grew up when forests surrounded her village in the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. Setra and her brother would spend their days canoeing on a nearby river, she says. “But now, it’s all gone. Dried out,” Setra says. Witnessing the changes over the course of her lifetime has guided her work as an activist and with AMAN, Indonesia’s biggest Indigenous alliance, where she now serves as deputy to the secretary-general on culture. While palm oil production remains a linchpin of Indonesia’s economy, outsiders and the Indonesian government have increasingly focused on another commodity: carbon — particularly the carbon in communities that have managed to hold on to their forests for generations. That’s concerning because, as Setra sees it, the trade of carbon credits, typically used by companies and individuals to offset their emissions, often fails to consider the connection that Indigenous peoples have to their forests. “Indigenous spirituality has not really been taken into account in the discussions on carbon markets. Not at all. Zero,” Setra tells Mongabay. In September, Setra and several colleagues from a group of Indigenous, community and nonprofit organizations that comprise the Pathways Alliance for Change and Transformation (PACT) published a paper calling for a moratorium on the forest carbon trade. The group wants to pause both voluntary and government-required compliance carbon markets until protections for the land rights of…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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