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Inside ICBS 2026 — What the Latest Carbon Summit Revealed About Indonesia's Carbon Market
Despite the volcanic eruption disrupting travel across the region, attendance at ICBS 2026 remained remarkably strong — a real testament to how much this ecosystem wants to show up. Some attendees took the train to Surabaya before flying on to Bali. Others made the journey by car or overnight sleeper bus. And in a detail that says everything about the community's dedication, ACEXI's own Chairman rode his motorbike all the way from Jogja to be there!
So if you caught our earlier post about the chaotic trip to Bali (volcano, online school, airport drama, the works) — we made it, and Cleanomic spent time at the Indonesia Carbon & Biodiversity Summit (ICBS) 2026 at The Westin Nusa Dua as the official media partner.
Time to actually talk about what happened there.
First, who's even running this thing?
ICBS 2026 is organized by ICBA — the Indonesia Carbon Credit and Biodiversity Alliance. The summit bills itself as Asia-Pacific's premier gathering for carbon market professionals, policymakers, and capital — basically putting regulators, buyers, standards bodies, capital providers, project developers, and tech all in one room around Indonesia's carbon and biodiversity market. The framing ICBA uses is that three forces are converging right now: our maturing regulatory infrastructure (SRN registry, IDXCarbon, Article 6), Indonesia's growing role as a carbon removal supplier, and rising corporate demand for credits — including from major tech buyers. That convergence is basically why this summit exists.
Onto what was actually discussed.
1. Avoidance vs. Removal
Is removal (actively pulling carbon out of the atmosphere — think reforestation, mangrove restoration) inherently higher integrity than avoidance (preventing emissions that would've otherwise happened)? Buyers are increasingly demanding removal credits — nobody wants to be the company on the front page accused of greenwashing with an avoidance credit that's hard to verify. Removal credits can generally "stand behind" their claims more confidently, and they can support multi-year offtake agreements, which buyers like for predictability.
But here's the pushback: removal credits are priced higher, yes, but retirement volume for removal credits is still under 10% of the total market. So the premium narrative might not hold once the market matures further. One panelist compared avoidance vs. removal to different flight classes — they serve different buyers, they're not really competing head-to-head. And from an investor's lens, a diversified portfolio makes more commercial sense: avoidance gives shorter timelines and earlier cash flow, removal is longer-term with higher upfront capex. Some project developers are now building projects with multiple methodologies and multiple buyer types built in from day one — instead of "cookie-cutting" a single approach.
One nuance worth flagging: American/US tech buyers specifically are still demanding high-integrity avoidance credits, not just removal. So this isn't a clean "removal wins" story — there's good and bad in both categories, and the market is still figuring out where the real premium sits.
2. Innovative Finance and Risk Appetite: Who's Willing to Go First?
Early-stage carbon projects are genuinely risky — land tenure isn't always secure, stakeholder engagement has to hold across multiple generations of a community, and even the physical assumptions can shift (will sea level rise actually undermine a mangrove restoration site over its crediting period?).
The takeaway here: this space needs a VC-type risk appetite, not traditional project finance thinking. We're starting to see carbon insurance products emerge to help underwrite some of that early risk, and corporate buyers themselves need to get comfortable with that risk profile too — not just developers and investors.
The open question that came up repeatedly: how do you attract investors before permits are even secured? That's the classic chicken-and-egg problem for early-stage projects, and nobody on the panel had a fully satisfying answer yet.
3. Indonesia Is Building Its Carbon Architecture — Notes from the Minister Interview
Cleanomic got a brief media interview with the Minister of Environment on-site. When asked what the government can do to make sure the benefits of carbon trading actually reach the community level, the minister pointed to prosperity as a core principle of the government's climate action framework — alongside adaptation and mitigation — with benefit-sharing for communities as one of its key pillars.
He also emphasized wanting to ensure that the economy functions properly within the areas where carbon units originate — including cases where local communities themselves become project implementers. This will involve working together with the Ministry of Cooperatives, and will be governed under the RUU Pengendalian Perubahan Iklim yang Berkeadilan (the Just Climate Change Control Bill) — with "berkeadilan" (just/equitable) being precisely the element meant to anchor that prosperity principle in law.
There will also be dedicated training rolled out for all regional environmental agency heads and regents/bupati — the goal being to make sure local government actually understands carbon mechanisms, not just national-level regulators.
4. Upcoming Challenges to Address
Here are some of the key challenges the panels kept coming back to:
Benefit-sharing over 40 - 70 years. How do you structure fair, lasting benefit-sharing with local communities across a project lifespan that can run seven decades? That's not just a legal drafting problem — it's an intergenerational trust problem.
Trust has to be earned with real impact now, not promises. A huge share of Indonesia's restorable mangrove land is currently tambak (aquaculture ponds) — this conversion is one of the most cited drivers of mangrove loss nationally. If you want communities to give that land back to mangrove, you have to convince them there's a concrete return waiting for them. That means upfront investment just to build trust, well before a single carbon credit is ever issued.
Regulators need to understand investor risk, too. Investors are the ones taking on that upfront risk — and projects may simply not be investible on pure economics without support. That's where catalytic funding comes in: blended finance or concessional capital that absorbs some of that early risk so private capital can follow.
Land tenure certainty — still, after all this, one of the most basic and most unresolved issues underpinning almost everything above.
One panel captured this well: real conservation work has to function as a "painkiller," not a lecture — communities disengage when a project asks them to sacrifice without addressing an actual, immediate need (like feeding their families). Alternative livelihoods aren't a nice-to-have; they're foundational design requirements.
The Key Takeaway
Indonesia is mid-process on implementing carbon regulations — the ecosystem is actively being built, not finished. And the overall mood at ICBS was genuinely upbeat: with new regulations now in place, global investors are increasingly taking notice, and project developers actively building in Indonesia were everywhere at the summit. Demand is clearly there, both domestic and international.
But the real question hanging over the whole summit was: how do we move fast enough not to fall behind the region, while still safeguarding integrity and actually producing high-quality, high-integrity carbon credits? As ICBA chairman Rob Raffael Kardinal put it: "Pasar karbon tidak akan berkembang hanya dengan regulasi. Kita membutuhkan proyek yang berkualitas, pembiayaan, permintaan dari buyer, serta pemahaman dan kapasitas yang memadai di seluruh ekosistem" — the carbon market won't grow on regulation alone; it needs high-quality projects, financing, buyer demand, and adequate understanding and capacity across the whole ecosystem.
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