Indonesia's carbon registry nears full launch

From ledger to live market

Indonesia's national carbon registry has moved from a mid-2026 target to an operating system. On July 9, 2026, the government switched on the Carbon Unit Registry System, known as SRUK, in a Jakarta ceremony attended by Forestry Minister Raja Juli Antoni, Coordinating Minister for Food Zulkifli Hasan, Environment Minister Jumhur Hidayat, Special Presidential Envoy for Energy and Environment Hashim Djojohadikusumo, and Financial Services Authority chairwoman Friderica Widyasari Dewi. On its own, a registry is unglamorous infrastructure. It is the ledger a functioning carbon market depends on, the record that tracks every credit from issuance to retirement so the same tonne of avoided emissions cannot be claimed twice, once by a project developer and again by a buyer, or across two different schemes.

SRUK replaces the older SRN-PPI system for trading purposes, though SRN-PPI continues to track Indonesia's broader national mitigation and adaptation reporting. Under the rules that accompany it, a completed carbon transaction must appear in the registry within two working days, with every unit tagged as available, retired, suspended, or cancelled so regulators, buyers, and project developers are all reading from the same record.

What the scheme already covers

The registry sits on top of a compliance market that has been quietly growing since 2023. Indonesia's cap-and-trade scheme for power generation, covering coal-fired plants of 25 megawatts or larger, combined-cycle plants, and gas-fired generation, expanded from 42 entities and 99 installations in its first year to 63 entities and 146 installations in 2024, then to 563 installations in 2025 once captive coal and gas facilities were folded in, the growth curve shown in the chart above. The scheme's first phase, covering 2023 and 2024, set a combined emissions ceiling of roughly 256.8 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, against which 2024 verified emissions came in at 225.3 million tonnes. IDXCarbon, the carbon exchange operating under the Indonesia Stock Exchange since September 2023 and licensed by the Financial Services Authority, had recorded participation from more than 130 entities and roughly 0.6 million tonnes of trades by the end of 2025, though the 2025 allowance auction itself was postponed while the new regulatory framework was finalized, meaning no allowances were issued and no auction trading took place as of January 2026.

That framework is Presidential Regulation No. 110 of 2025, signed in October 2025 and published in December 2025, which revoked the 2021 regulation that had governed the market since its inception. Running 103 articles across nine chapters, it reclassifies Indonesia's carbon economic value system into five instrument types, emissions trading, offsetting, results-based payments, carbon levies, and other emerging mechanisms, and extends sector coverage for the first time to blue carbon ecosystems such as mangroves and seagrass, and to oil and gas upstream and midstream emissions, including methane reduction and carbon capture and storage. A joint ministerial regulation on the national trading roadmap and a Ministry of Finance policy on the long-pending carbon levy are still outstanding.

Forestry's breakout moment

The clearest early beneficiary of the new registry is forestry. On July 6, 2026, three days before SRUK went live, the Ministry of Forestry issued trading permits to four projects covering roughly 225,000 hectares, the Katingan Peatland Restoration and Conservation Project, the Sumatra Merang Peatland Project, the Mayas Project, and the Bujang Raba landscape in Jambi's Bungo Regency, the first approvals since Indonesia froze carbon credit exports in 2022. Together the projects carry an estimated 30 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in reduction potential, with at least 20 million tonnes already verified for issuance under the Verra registry. Minister Raja Juli Antoni linked the approval to roughly Rp5 trillion, about US$277.5 million, in projected carbon transactions and an estimated Rp500 billion in non-tax state revenue, and separately said the four permits, three at concession scale and one held by a community-level social forestry group spanning 8.3 million hectares of social forestry and 1.4 million hectares of customary forest nationally, could unlock about US$5.8 billion in green investment and some 570 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in longer-term reduction potential.

"This demonstrates that Indonesia is not only building policy frameworks but also creating concrete and credible market opportunities for investors," said Raja Juli Antoni, Minister of Forestry, announcing the issuance at London Climate Action Week on June 24, 2026.

At the SRUK launch itself, the minister framed the registry in social rather than purely commercial terms.

"Carbon trading is not only for the elite, not only for those who have long been well-off, but also for people at the grassroots level," Raja Juli Antoni said.

Reopening to the world

The registry's launch is inseparable from Indonesia's decision to reopen international carbon trading after a four-year pause. The 2021 moratorium had been imposed to give the state control over a market where some avoided-deforestation projects had drawn concern over credit integrity and how benefits were shared with local communities. Presidential Regulation 110/2025 lifted that freeze, permitting international sales under UNFCCC Article 6 with an optional corresponding-adjustment mechanism to prevent double counting, and, notably, dropping the prior requirement that Indonesia meet its own national climate targets before exporting credits at all. Indonesia signed mutual recognition agreements with Gold Standard in May 2025 and with Verra in October 2025, formally accepting credits certified under both schemes provided the underlying projects register on the national platform, and has separately established an Article 6 cooperation arrangement with Singapore.

What still has to be built

Forestry is furthest along, with its own dedicated Ministerial Regulations 6 and 7 of 2026 already governing trading procedures and standards. Energy sector rules are reportedly one to two months from completion, and waste, industrial processes, agriculture, and marine and fisheries coverage remains at an earlier stage. The carbon levy authorized in principle by Law No. 7 of 2021 still has no Ministry of Finance implementing rule, so exceeding an emissions quota under the compliance scheme currently carries no direct financial penalty. IDXCarbon's own minimum and reserve prices, as low as Rp200 and Rp1 per unit respectively before the 2025 auction was postponed, are a reminder that a functioning registry does not by itself guarantee a market thick enough to set a credible price, a separate task from the ledger question the registry solves.

Sirkularium's view

For government and public institutions, SRUK's launch is best read as necessary rather than sufficient. A single, trusted registry is what allows a buyer to trust a credit, a regulator to see the whole market, and Indonesia to build a reputation in carbon markets rather than lose one, which matters directly for the roughly US$5.8 billion in green investment the government is now attaching to just four forestry projects. The bigger test lies just past the ledger: finishing the energy-sector trading rules within the one to two month window officials have suggested, setting a Ministry of Finance carbon levy so exceeding a quota carries a real cost, and building IDXCarbon's auction volume up from a paused 2025 to a market that prices carbon meaningfully above a token minimum. Indonesia now has the plumbing a serious carbon market needs. Whether that market delivers the grassroots benefit Minister Raja Juli Antoni described will depend on finishing the remaining rules with the same urgency applied to the registry itself.