BARCELONA — Sumatra is an Indonesian island that holds some of the globe’s most diverse forests. When these trees are cut down or they burn, the peat soils underneath are exposed, releasing carbon dioxide as the peat oxidizes and decomposes.

The peat is so deep in parts of Sumatra – going down up to 10 feet in some areas – that conservationists say that keeping the forests from being cleared could have a measurable impact on greenhouse gas emissions globally.

According to the environmental group WWF, Sumatra has lost 48 percent of forest cover in the past 23 years releasing vast amounts of planet-warming gases – making the Sumatran forest problem a global problem.

On Thursday at the World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, Spain, WWF and Indonesian authorities announced a political agreement – signed September 18 in the Indonesian capital Jakarata between all 10 governors on the island and four federal ministers – to “agree to save and conserve the ecosystem of Sumatra Island.”



The commitment is the first island-wide agreement of its kind according to WWF, which expects the agreement to be permanent and to require any development on the island to take into account maintenance of the ecosystem. But implementing the accord is unlikely to be straightforward.

“There are a lot of challenges in the future to ensure the successful implementation of the commitment,” acknowledged Noor Hidayat, the director of conservation areas for the forestry ministry in Indonesia.

The next steps will involve coming up with an island-wide conservation plan, said Hermien Roosita, the deputy minister for the environment of Indonesia.

Why the change, and why now?

According to WWF, a major part of the reason is the emerging, and potentially lucrative market, for keeping CO2 sequestered in forests.

“Sumatra’s forests are a triple bonus for forest carbon investors. They can pay to protect the forests, the megafauna that live there and Southeast Asia’s largest carbon store,” said Nazir Faoued, a senior WWF representative in Indonesia.

To be sure, a number of environmental groups remain extremely skeptical about the effects on forest peoples of market-based mechanisms, and they question the effectiveness of carbon-trading in cutting pollution. As I wrote at Green Inc. a few weeks ago, carbon markets still are in their infancy and have been strongly criticized for failing to push up the price of polluting to levels where companies and citizens responsible for most of the planet’s harmful emissions actually change their behavior.

Even so, efforts to use capital from rich countries to help prevent the destruction of tropical forests are increasingly in favor among key environmental leaders, including former Vice President Al Gore.

Last month, Mr. Gore described funding for forest preservation as “one of many tools” needed for an effort that must include deep cuts in gas emissions from established and emerging industrial powers.