The Norwegian Embassy in Jakarta has recently established a new counsellor post to strengthen the focus on deforestation and low carbon development in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Vietnam. Ms. Ragnhildstveit will work to prepare a strategy for implementation of the Government of Norway International Climate and Forest Initiative. Ms. Ragnhildstveit started working for the Embassy in the beginning of January, but she knows the region well and speaks Bahasa Indonesia.
Background
The Government's Climate and Forest Initiative was launched by Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg at the climate summit on Bali in December 2007, and started in the spring of 2008. One of the key objectives of the project is to include the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries in a new global climate agreement. The initiative is aimed at all the tropical forests and builds to a great extent on cooperation with multilateral channels such as UN, World Bank and regional development banks.
Indonesia, Vietnam and Papua New Guinea were three of the nine countries that were included in the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD) from the start, and the three countries have begun working to create national strategies, establish systems to monitor, assess, report and verify the extent of forests and carbon emissions and initiate necessary action.