An insightful discussion was held between ACCEPT II Team and Giovanni Galanti, the representative of ARISE+ Indonesia on 31 May 2023 in ASEAN Centre for Energy (ACE) office. ARISE+, one of the flagship initiatives under the EU-Indonesia cooperation framework from 2014 to 2020 has planning to support the implementation of EU Green Initiative on Food and Agriculture sector.  

• Giovanni Galanti and the ACCEPT team; Muhammad Shidiq, Aldilla Noor Rakhiemah, Dewa Made Raditya Margenta, and Indira Pradnyaswari, discussed more on potential collaboration on tackling climate issues on food and agriculture sector that could be jointly implemented with ACCEPT II under EU Green Initiatives. 
• In particular, the proposed collaboration will emphasize more on the agricultural, food value chain, and sustainable food industry sides which is a unique perspective from climate change sector that was being brought up by the institution. 

The meeting was started with a brief introduction of ACCEPT II Project to seek the potential gap that could be filled by further collaboration in the EU Green Initiatives. In this opportunity, Giovanni Galanti, one of the experts from ARISE+ mentioned that there is a huge interest in connecting with ACCEPT II project due to the significant topic that is being discussed in ARISE+. In which, the topic included green building approach, decreasing environmental and social impact from climate change and energy project, energy efficiency in industrial sector, agricultural impacts on climate change, and maintaining the concept of green deal. Even though there were a lot of topics being discussed, the meeting narrowed down to having more agricultural consideration from the climate change issue.  

The idea of combining agriculture into one of the climate change strategies could be defined as a brilliant approach. Muhammad Shidiq, Senior Researcher of ACCEPT II noticed that the proposed solution might be a good deal for ACCEPT II project development. Moreover, the ASEAN region is categorized as one of the most productive agricultural baskets in the world with a constant growth of yield production. In fact, the European countries have been implying the concept of carbon farming, an agricultural method aimed at sequestering atmospheric carbon into the soil and in crop roots, wood and leaves. The project also promises to set specific goals for energy management, carbon footprint, and energy-related capacity building in the agricultural sector. Seeing the high potential in the ASEAN region, however, the member states still need to find the best possible way to involve agriculture in the energy sector. 

The discussion has also highlighted that agricultural waste also plays a big role in emission production thus minimizing emission from this sector is needed. Giovanni said that there is a promising capability in between ASEAN member states to generate energy from organic waste of agriculture. Furthermore, ASEAN also needs to add the calculation of carbon footprint from the agriculture sector. Nonetheless, the new approach is still considered as a big challenge in the ASEAN region. Thus, further cooperation with the EU may relate energy emphasizing on agriculture and food sector such as to baseline assessment, policy and technical analysis and supporting infrastructure development.  

Detailed information on ACCEPT II can be found at https://accept.aseanenergy.org/.  

ACCEPT II welcomes any collaboration, please feel free to contact us at [email protected]