Jakarta— The widely supported High Carbon Stock Approach [1] is a tool to help companies and other stakeholders implement commitments to end deforestation. It puts ‘No Deforestation’ into practice on the ground by identifying degraded areas suitable for potential plantation development and forest areas for protection while respecting community rights and livelihoods. The HCS Approach has been developed since 2011 and is adopted by some of the largest companies in the plantation sector, such as APP, Wilmar, Cargill and GAR, consumer companies Unilever and Procter & Gamble, as well as leading NGOs, like WWF, RAN, UCS, Greenpeace and Forest Peoples Programme.

In response to this robust and practical methodology, a group of companies — the Sustainable Palm Oil Manifesto group (SPOM) — initiated the “HCS Study”, the results of which were announced on December 11. For the future, as the SPOM HCS Study is a business initiative with no multi-stakeholder governance, we see the HCS Approach Steering Group with its mix of plantation, manufacturer and consumer companies, NGOs and technical support organisations as the body that will provide the oversight of the HCS methodology.

Although we have four years’ experience developing the High Carbon Stock Approach with many companies implementing it over millions of hectares in five countries, Greenpeace nevertheless welcomes any additional research and science review relating to HCS forests. Greenpeace has made the following statements after reviewing the results of the new SPOM study.

  • The HCS Study findings and recommendations on the use of LiDAR to estimate above-ground biomass, using estimates of soil carbon, and elaborations on socio-economic aspects we believe can be immediately converged with the HCS Approach. We look forward to joint trials and field testing that would achieve this and we believe this should be the focus of the ‘convergence’ process between the HCS Approach and HCS Study.
  • Greenpeace welcomes the Study’s commitment, in common with the HCS Approach, to protect primary forest and logged secondary forests, to use forest patch analysis to help determine areas for conservation, to support High Conservation Values (HCV), and to support strong implementation of Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) with local communities.
  • However, with a high threshold of 75tC/ha used to define what is a High Carbon Stock forest and through seeing forest as mere sticks of carbon in a carbon-neutral equation, by the study’s own admission, the methodology is not focused on achieving ‘No Deforestation’ but rather ‘sustainable development’ and no net carbon emissions.  This contrasts with the HCS Approach, which is a practical methodology to achieve No Deforestation, where many of the young regenerating forests that the HCS Study proposes to destroy, would be conserved together with local communities.
  • We find it alarming that with the HCS Study’s carbon neutral focus, in degraded landscapes with considerable open land, scrub and young secondary forest (such as Sumatra and Kalimantan), the carbon sequestered by palm oil plantations planted on the low-carbon open and scrub lands could be used to ‘balance’ the carbon losses from clearance of the remaining forest remnants. These degraded landscapes desperately need forest conservation as its potentially regenerate to forested habitat, not a tool to justify further forest destruction.
  • Companies and smallholders are looking for easily applied and cost effective methods to implement environmental commitments – the HCS Study is highly technical and elitist, to the exclusion of smallholders and small to medium sized companies. Other than identifying the need to make it work for smallholders, it currently offers them limited possibilities for using it.
  • Likewise for local communities, there remain many unanswered questions on whether the carbon neutral approach will be used as a further tool to grab their lands, as there are scant details on the social pre-conditions and ‘contract’ that is needed to put a carbon neutral approach in place on the ground with customary land-owning communities.
  • While ‘carbon neutral development’ may sound simple, achieving it on the ground is enormously difficult when safeguards, uncertainties, on- or off-site carbon offsets, equity of benefits, and monitoring are considered.  We see massive holes in the HCS Study’s carbon neutral approach that can decreased the ‘No Deforestation’ commitment that already run.
  • With only one field test in Gabon, the HCS Study is very much based on theory rather than practice.  Considerable field testing and piloting will be required to really understand whether it is workable, and what the outcomes are even for small-holder scale. We are particularly concerned that the Gabon field test with Olam involved the conversion of forest areas [2], contrary to the threshold of the HCS Study.

Notes to the editor:
[1] See http://highcarbonstock.org/
[2] Defined as areas >75tC/ha – see maps of Lot 2 on p88 & p97 in ‘HCS Science Study – Independent Report from the Technical Committee’

Media Contacts:
Annisa Rahmawati, Forest Campaigner, Greenpeace Indonesia
E: [email protected], M: +62 8111097527

Sol Gosetti, International Communications Coordinator, Indonesia Forest Campaign
E: [email protected], M: +447380845754