Indonesia's National Carbon Accounting System (INCAS) — Satellite MRV Behind Two Results-Based REDD+ Payments

The Indonesia National Carbon Accounting System (INCAS) is a wall-to-wall, annual forest-cover-change monitoring system built on time-series Landsat imagery, covering the whole of Indonesia from 2000 to the present. Development began in 2009 under the Indonesia–Australia Forest Carbon Partnership, adapting methods from Australia's own National Carbon Accounting System.

The pipeline — ortho-rectification, calibration, cloud masking, mosaicing and multi-temporal probabilistic classification — is documented in peer-reviewed remote-sensing literature, with explicit attention to classification accuracy at each processing step.

INCAS output has directly underpinned two major international results-based payments for verified emission reductions. In 2019, Norway agreed to pay Indonesia 530 million krone (about US$56 million) after Indonesia's national reporting, grounded in INCAS-derived land-cover-change data, showed 11.23 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions avoided in 2017 compared to a reference level. Separately, the Green Climate Fund's Board approved US$103.8 million in results-based payments in 2021 for a reported 20.25 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent emission reductions from deforestation and forest degradation over 2014–2016.

The system illustrates both the promise and the limits of nationally-run satellite MRV: it gives Indonesia sovereign, wall-to-wall monitoring capacity rather than dependence on external verifiers, and has been technically credible enough to unlock large multilateral and bilateral payments. At the same time, the broader Indonesia–Norway REDD+ relationship has been diplomatically volatile — the original $1 billion agreement was suspended by Indonesia in 2021 over delayed payment before a narrower partnership resumed in 2022 — and INCAS' technical monitoring layer has proven more durable and less contested than the political payment relationships built on top of it.