“Carbon emission reduction scheme has led to the concept of ‘carbon rights’ as a new area for contest and cooperation,” said Beria Leimona, from the World Agroforestry Centre at the International Conference on Legal Pluralist Perspectives on Development and Cultural Diversity, Zurich, Switzerland, in early September 2009.

During her presentation, Leimona showed the implementation of the voluntary Afforestration/Reforestation rules for the Clean Development Mechanism (A/R CDM)- in Indonesia under the facilitation of RUPES Project of ICRAF-SEA and the lessons learned to discern its legal pluralism aspects.

“In fact, each scale engages different actors, perspectives, norms, and behaviour towards these global conventions. These differences will also lead to different perspectives on 'carbon rights', to the questions of who should benefit more, how is the payment allocation, and many others,” explained Leimona.

The joint paper Leimona wrote together with other senior ICRAF scientists for the conference discovered that forest policies and regulations in Indonesia have not been designed to deal with the current issues of carbon emission in global climate debate, but it frames rights and responsibilities that apply.

“By presenting this case in this international conference, we expect some international pressure to increase the urgency and challenges in forest tenure reform and cross-scale governance,” said Leimona about here presentation in the conference that was organized by the Commission on Legal Pluralism under the support of University of Zurich and various Swiss national institutions.

“It is indeed a very relevant conference to ICRAF as we work not only on environmental issues, but also on promoting the development of policy and legal aspects that support for better transformation landscape and livelihood,” said Leimona iterating ICRAF’s mission.