A year later, the project is close to collapse, a casualty of labyrinthine Indonesian bureaucracy, opaque laws and a secretive palm oil company.
The Rimba Raya project, on the island of Borneo, is part of a United Nations-backed scheme designed to reward poorer nations that protect their carbon-rich jungles.
Deep peat in some of Indonesia's rainforests stores billions of tonnes of carbon so preserving those forests is regarded as crucial in the fight against climate change.
By putting a value on the carbon, the 90,000-hectare (225,000 acre) project would help prove that investors can turn a profit from the world's jungles in ways that do not involve cutting them down.
After three years of work, more than $2 million (1 million pounds) in development costs, and what seemed like the green light from Jakarta, the project is proof that saving the world's tropical rainforests will be far more complicated than simply setting up a framework to allow market forces to function. Read the full report here.
Source: by David Fogarty, Swissinfo.ch, Singapore.
