Apriadi Gunawan and Hotli Simanjuntak, Banda Aceh – The Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi) declared on Wednesday that it would reject all agreements made during the Governors' Climate and Forest (GCF) forum in Aceh.

Walhi executive director Berry Nahdran Forqan said any agreements made during the five-day forum would not produce credible solutions to deal with climate change since the forum had not involved civil society members.

The civil society members, he said, would have represented the general public, who would be directly affected by impacts of climate change.

"The meeting is at fault, democratically and substantially. It should be stopped and the results should be rejected," he told reporters in Medan on Wednesday.

He said the meeting was more a ceremony than a credible forum and had come at a time when there were still unclear concepts about dealing with climate change.

He said that in Indonesia many government projects conflicted with the public interest.

Citing an example of this, he said the government had not included peat lands in Sumatra and Kalimantan in its program to protect peat lands in the country from conversion, despite it being widely known that peat lands were large storers of carbon.

He also blamed land conversion projects started by the government-backed oil palm industry for sidelining community forest programs developed and run by local people.

Currently, he said, 300 community forest programs developed by local people had lost their battles to stop their land and forests being converted into oil palm plantations.

"It's better to stop the governors' forum since it's such a waste of time. We don't know for whom this forum is intended and it certainly brings no benefit to the people," Berry said.

The Governors' Climate and Forest forum opened in Banda Aceh on Monday to discuss and formulate a number of policies to fight for the rights of local people to maintain their own forests and profit from carbon trade.

The host, Aceh Governor Irwandi Yusuf, said the meeting – the third after previous forums held in Brazil and California – was hoped to produce concrete results on a carbon trade mechanism that would also benefit Acehnese in preserving their forests.

On Wednesday, several provinces in Indonesia expressed their readiness to take part in carbon trading schemes to cut greenhouse gas emissions, which are blamed for worsening climate change.

"We are currently preparing several steps to get involved [in carbon trading schemes], such as issuing local policies to stop illegal logging and timber smuggling from Papua," West Papua provincial administration's secretary Martin Luther said.

Many reports have found that halting forest and peat clearance is far more effective than planting trees to absorb emissions.