Heaptalk, Jakarta — Climate-Hub Indonesia, a law firm specializing in climate change, delves into the significance of standardization in carbon accounting for Indonesia.
As one of the biggest carbon emitters, Indonesia needs to develop its own standards instead of solely referring to international standards created by foreign countries. According to Irvan Pulungan, Climate-Hub Indonesia CEO, Indonesia is the most potential country to develop standardization in carbon accounting as it has abundant carbon sequester or storage resources, including forests and sea.
“An association that can develop a standardization for Indonesia is in need right now. That way, we can have our sovereignty in the process. At the same time, we can also offer it to Kenya, Brazil, and same-minded countries in the IPCC forum. They have a coalition between tropical countries like Indonesia, Brazil, Vietnam, and Kenya. As a result, we can have a more localized standard rather than the international one,” Irvan explained to Poempida Hidayatulloh, an environmental activist, on the Forum Carbon Indonesia YouTube channel.
In more detail, Irvan described one of the issues emerging from standardization as unsuitable for the local context. He said, “I used to implement IPCC 2006. However, we cannot sometimes measure the indirect emissions in Scope 2 and Scope 3. For transportation, for example, we cannot say that Jakarta’s vehicles only come from Jakarta. There is a possibility they buy their fuel in Bekasi or Bogor and then travel to Jakarta. It’s a little bit problematic.”
Establishing a code of conduct
On the other hand, as an environmental lawyer, Irvan also emphasized the gravity of establishing a code of conduct. “Ethics is the basis of all of this. For example, the benefit of doing carbon accounting is that you can ethically say I’m not part of the environmental problem. I think carbon accountants must also have a code of conduct and ethical conduct to help their clients,” he added.
Some issues in the forestry sector are the rights of Indigenous people and human rights. Stakeholders in carbon projects can remove people from the project and do similar things. Irvan saw that the code of conduct would safeguard accountants in providing their services to the client.
Climate-Hub Indonesia serves several clients, including a consortium from Singapore and Indonesia. Irvan said, “They want to develop a carbon and conservation project in Cianjur, West Java, at Takokak Village for about 26 acres and in Klaten, West Java.”
Climate-Hub Indonesia is a boutique law firm specializing in legal services in climate change, environmental, and human rights law in litigation and non-litigation contexts. We provide services in formulating sustainability reports, carbon accounting, legal due diligence, policy drafting, and quantitative and qualitative research related to environmental protection and management, conservation, climate resilience-disaster risk reduction, and natural resource management.
