Guardians of the Canopy: Why the Dayak Bahau Umaq Suling Rejected the World Bank’s Carbon Millions

By Collaborative Investigative Reporting
(Mongabay Indonesia, Kaltim Post, Intuisi.co, and Prolog.co.id)

Introduction: Morning Mist over Long Isun

Morning mist still clung to the canopy, brushing against the emerald foliage that blankets the remote rimba of Kampung Long Isun in Mahakam Ulu Regency, East Kalimantan. Walking down the village path toward the forest, Bonaventura Bayau, the Indigenous Head (Kepala Adat) of the Dayak Bahau Umaq Suling community, greeted passing residents as he had every morning of his life.

"The Umaq Suling people deeply love and protect the forest," Bayau said in early June 2026.

For generations, long before the modern lexicon of global climate finance introduced terms like "carbon credits" and "deforestation," the Indigenous people of Long Isun practiced traditional rotational swidden agriculture. Their relationship with the land is not transactional; it is ancestral, sacred, and absolute.

However, over the past seven years, this centuries-old tradition has collided head-on with a massive international financial mechanism: the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility-Carbon Fund (FCPF-CF). Conceived as a joint initiative between the World Bank and the Indonesian government, the project aims to slash greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation under the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) framework.

Under this scheme, the World Bank committed to dishing out up to $100 million (approximately IDR 1.6 trillion) through 2028, provided Indonesia successfully curtails 22 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent ($CO_2e$) emissions. East Kalimantan was selected as a flagship pilot region—the first in the Asia-Pacific to receive performance-based carbon funding from the FCPF-CF, largely due to its vast tropical forest cover, which spans 6.5 million hectares or roughly 54% of the province.

Yet, when financial incentives arrived at their doorstep, the Dayak Bahau Umaq Suling community didn’t open their arms. Instead, they stood firm, drawing a hard line against the multimillion-dollar project to safeguard their ancestral forests and traditional way of life.

Main Facts: The Battlegrounds of Carbon and Culture

The core conflict in Long Isun exposes a deep fracture between top-down global climate governance and grassroots Indigenous sovereignty.

• The Project: The FCPF-CF aims to reduce emissions by keeping forests standing. In its first phase, the carbon payout targeted 417 villages, 24 sub-districts, 143 community groups, and seven Indigenous communities across East Kalimantan, including Kampung Long Isun.
• The Resistance: Despite the promise of development funds, the Dayak Bahau Umaq Suling flatly rejected the carbon incentive scheme.
• The Justification: Community leaders emphasize that the project’s rigid compliance requirements threaten their traditional farming practices, notably controlled land-clearing and burning rituals. Furthermore, their historical land rights remain legally unsecured, mired in decades of tenurial conflicts with corporate timber concessions.
• The External Scrutiny: The project has drawn intense criticism from human rights and environmental watchdogs like Accountability Counsel, Perkumpulan Nurani Perempuan (PNP) Kaltim, and the Forest Peoples Programme, culminating in a formal complaint to the World Bank Inspection Panel in late 2025.

Chronology of Conflict: From Timber Battles to Carbon Controversies

The refusal of the Long Isun community is not an isolated event; it is the culmination of decades of fighting for territorial self-determination.

The Historical Roots and Land Tenure Struggles (2014–2018)

Long Isun’s distrust of external administrative programs traces back to prolonged agrarian conflicts. For years, the community’s traditional territory has overlapped with the logging concession of PT Kemakmuran Berkah Timber (KBT), a subsidiary of the Roda Mas Group.

Tensions boiled over in September 2014 when local Indigenous resistance against the timber company resulted in the criminalization of prominent traditional leader Teodorus Tekwan Ajat. Accused of extortion, Tekwan was detained for 109 days at the West Kutai Police Station—an event Damianus Nyuk, the current Village Chief (Petinggi) of Long Isun, remembers as a direct attack on their sovereignty.

Despite applying for official Indigenous Customary Forest (Masyarakat Hukum Adat or MHA) recognition over 108,450 hectares since 2018, legal certainty remained elusive for years. In June 2026, the local government of Mahakam Ulu finally granted them MHA legitimacy for a portion of their land—a vital milestone, yet a delayed one.

The 2024 Manipulation Controversy

Tensions escalated on August 13, 2024. Community members gathered at the Long Isun Village Hall under the impression that they were attending a technical verification meeting for their long-awaited MHA status. Instead, they walked into an unexpected FCPF carbon project socialization event.

Locals were reportedly pressured to sign attendance sheets that were later framed as acceptance documents for the FCPF program. Sensing manipulation, over 300 villagers quickly mobilized to revoke their signatures, filing formal objections against the coercion.

Intervention by the World Bank Inspection Panel (Late 2025–Early 2026)

Backed by civil society groups, the community filed a formal complaint to the World Bank Inspection Panel in November 2025. In response, an independent investigation team deployed to Jakarta, Samarinda, Mahakam Ulu, and Long Isun between February 17 and 26, 2026, to verify allegations of compromised consent, intimidation, and procedural violations.

Supporting Data and Structural Inequities

Critics and local leaders argue that the FCPF-CF architecture is structurally flawed, raising serious questions about equity, transparency, and target efficiency.

1. The Benefit-Sharing Imbalance

According to Julio Castor Achmadi, Communities Associate at Accountability Counsel, the project’s Benefit-Sharing Plan (BSP) heavily favors bureaucratic apparatuses over frontline guardians.

• East Kalimantan Provincial Government: Receives 65% of the funds.
• Project Management and Intermediaries: Consume 25%.
• Indigenous and Local Communities: Allocated a meager 10%.

"The proportion is deeply problematic because the Indigenous communities who actually protect the forest receive the smallest share," Achmadi noted. Early drafts even considered allocating funds directly to corporations, which critics argue would have greenwashed industrial forestry.

2. The Illusion of Informed Consent (FPIC Failures)

Under World Bank operational guidelines, projects affecting Indigenous peoples must strictly adhere to the principles of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC), ensuring transparency and open consultation. In Long Isun, experts argue this safeguard was entirely bypassed.

Rather than engaging the community transparently, the project design assumed regional compliance from the top down. Because the carbon accounting framework blankets the entirety of East Kalimantan administratively, Long Isun was factored into the carbon equation whether they consented or not. When they pushed back, intimidation tactics followed—including anonymous text messages threatening cuts to village development funds if they resisted the project.

Official Responses

Faced with mounting scrutiny, institutional stakeholders defended their positions while acknowledging implementation gaps.

• East Kalimantan Provincial Government: Iwan Darmawan, Head of the Economic Bureau of the East Kalimantan Regional Secretariat, acknowledged that the rollout encountered numerous hurdles. However, he maintained that fund allocation rigorously followed World Bank formulas, specifically the Emission Reductions Payment Agreement (ERPA) and the BSP.

  Regarding Long Isun’s rejection, Darmawan adopted a pragmatic stance:
  "If someone refuses, it’s fine. That’s why there is the FPIC principle… If they reject it, so be it; the money remains untouched and sits safely in the Environmental Fund Management Agency (BPDLH)."

  He added that delays in securing full customary forest status were primarily due to mapping costs and resource constraints, suggesting that carbon revenues could theoretically help finance future border demarcations.

  

• Intermediary Agencies: Kemitraan (Partnership), one of the intermediary institutions tasked with fund distribution, distanced itself from the village. Hasbi Berliani, Program Director at Kemitraan, stated that their organization never operated in Long Isun. "We were not directed to enter Long Isun by the provincial government. So, we did not go there at all," Berliani said. Meanwhile, another intermediary, Yayasan Penabulu, declined interview requests from the collaborative reporting team.

• The World Bank: Contacted via email on July 1, 2026, the World Bank provided a written response two weeks later, on July 15, but explicitly forbade quoting their statements for public attribution.

Implications: A Global Lesson from a Remote Village

The resistance in Kampung Long Isun reverberates far beyond the borders of Mahakam Ulu. It serves as a stark warning for global climate architects who view tropical forests through remote-sensing data while ignoring the human elements anchoring them.

For the Dayak Bahau Umaq Suling, the forest is not a carbon stock; it is an economic supermarket, a pharmacy, and a library.

• Livelihoods: Women rely on the forest for rattan used to weave traditional winnowing baskets (penampi), wall partitions, and rain-shielding hats (seraung).
• Traditional Medicine: Long before seeking modern medical interventions, locals rely on ancestral herbal pharmacopoeias harvested directly from the jungle. Ngayang Ding, Head of the Long Isun Village Consultative Body (BPK), notes: "To this day, if our children fall sick, we use forest remedies first before turning to modern medicine."

As Ngayang Ding eloquently summarized on behalf of her community:

"We have spent hundreds of years keeping this forest green without being paid by anyone. Let us protect our customary forest using our own methods and ancestral traditions, for the sake of Long Isun’s children and grandchildren."

Ultimately, Long Isun’s defiance has disrupted the prevailing narrative of carbon trading in Indonesia. It forces international financial institutions and national policymakers to reckon with an uncomfortable truth: true climate resilience cannot be built on procedural manipulation and top-down coercion. Until Indigenous sovereignty and land tenure rights are unconditionally respected, carbon millions will remain a currency built on shifting sands.

This investigative report is a collaborative project by Mongabay Indonesia, Kaltim Post, Intuisi.co, and Prolog.co.id, supported by the Business Climate and Media Initiative (BCMI) Informed Earth program.