- APRIL Group is pioneering a complex process to provide remedy for past environmental and social harms in Indonesia.
- Progress has been made with nearly 700,000 hectares of impacted land identified for potential restoration and 263 villages for social remedy for past harms in three impact areas.
- The company views remedy implementation as a locally driven process, requiring pragmatism and adaptability to navigate significant challenges and improve the process by doing.
- While supporting the framework’s evolution, a feasible and pragmatic approach needs to be taken that avoids procedural delays to and ensure the timely delivery of remedies to impacted communities.
At a panel session with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), Greenpeace, WWF, Rainforest Action Network and Forest Peoples Programme during the FSC General Assembly in Panama this week, Lucita Jasmin, Group Director of Sustainability at RGE, shared insights from APRIL Group’s pioneering implementation of the FSC Remedy Framework.
APRIL Group is navigating a complex process aimed at providing remedy for past environmental and social harms and healing relationships with communities. Jasmin highlighted the significant scale of the undertaking in Indonesia.
Independent baseline assessments have identified a total impact area of 1.4 million hectares, encompassing 711 villages of which 263 villages have been identified as having suffered harms. Environmental remedy requirement has been estimated at 700,000 hectares.
Reflecting on the journey so far, Jasmin noted that the framework is untested, requiring pragmatism and adaptability from all parties. It also needs to be locally owned and driven.
Key challenges include the retrospective nature of the work – identifying environmental values and rights holders from three decades ago – and navigating complex local dynamics such as overlapping land claims and horizontal conflicts within communities. A particularly sensitive challenge, she explained, is determining how to engage with communities that have suffered harm but have not given their consent to participate in the remedy process.
Lucita Jasmin, Group Director of Sustainability, RGE speaking at a side event at the FSC General Assembly in Panama
Addressing a recent community conflict at group company TPL in North Sumatra, Jasmin reaffirmed APRIL Group’s commitment to an independent investigation.
The company is commissioning a third-party local NGO to do field investigation and experts to conduct a root cause analysis, with findings to be peer-reviewed by social experts within the FSC ecosystem. In the interim, a moratorium on operational activities is reinforced in the conflict areas.
Jasmin also shared APRIL Group’s perspective on a motion being proposed to FSC members at the General Assembly. She expressed concern that Motion 28 could introduce significant complexity and cause delays which could compromise the feasibility of FSC and companies being able to implement the remedy process in practice.
This would ultimately hinder the delivery of timely remedies to local communities in Indonesia, she said. “The process needs to be given a chance. It needs to be enabled, not hindered”.
Jasmin reiterated APRIL’s commitment to an effective process, provided that the remedy framework remains feasible, pragmatic, and adaptive to succeed on the ground.
“APRIL is committed to implementing the FSC Remedy Framework. We are keen to address our legacy issues and remedy the past harms from our operations, as we also implement forward-looking commitments under our 2030 agenda”.
“We believe that the remedy process can deliver significant outcomes for the environment and for the local communities in Indonesia. If, however, we make it even more complex and prescriptive, we risk stretching the framework to a point where it might be no longer reasonable to implement”.
Read a report on the panel discussion on the FSC General Assembly site.
