KFCP’s failure provides plenty of lessons about big, hasty climate commitments.

Especially so, because Kalimantan was somewhat pre-planned, compared to the Prime Minister’s vague Paris commitment to shuffle $1 billion out of ­existing assistance budgets into unspecified projects in undesignated Pacific countries.

The Central Kalimantan project and associated assignments cost about $65 million — governments of the two previous prime ministers declined to precisely quantify what was spent and how.

KFCP blocked, wholly or ­partly, only 40 per cent of the designated small drainage canals, but not the largest canal, which was the main physical part of the ­mission; it planted perhaps 2.6 per cent of the originally nominated number of trees.

The project left local people badly disgruntled, according to ­Indonesian and Australian NGOs. which have attacked it relentlessly for 2½ years, though better-off for the spending, said development expert Robin Davies.

For Mr Turnbull the denouement might have been especially hurtful.

Had Julia Gillard’s government not shut down KFCP in mid-2013 it was certain to be axed by the man who had beaten Mr Turnbull to the prime ministership, Tony Abbott.

“KFCP failed to achieve — in fact at no point attempted to achieve — its central objective, which was to trial the use of ­performance-based payments to effect quantified emission reductions,” writes Mr Davies in his ­recent study, The Indonesia-Australia Forest Carbon Partnership: A Murder Mystery.

WALHI (Friends of the Earth Indonesia) campaigner Deddy Ratih said: “They just wanted to spend money, but on the wrong targets. That’s why the project was never maximal.

“It was like a (Suharto-era) New Order project. They only tried to influence the village heads, not the people.”

Mr Deddy was a signatory to FOE’s appeal in August 2013 to the doomed Labor government for ­detailed information on project spending and “an open review of (Australia’s) failed experiment in climate aid in Central ­Kalimantan”.

There was no response from Canberra and even today it is not precisely clear whether $65m was the final cost of the ­Indonesia-Australia Forest Carbon Partnership in which KFPC was embedded by the Rudd ­government.

“The incoming Abbott ­Coalition government felt no obligation to respond on any of the points above, and undoubtedly felt relieved, and perhaps also surprised, that its predecessor had saved it the trouble of closing IAFCP, including KFCP,” writes Mr Davies in a recent paper,

From 2003 to 2006 Mr Davies headed the Indonesia program for AusAID, the now defunct government overseas aid agency.

In September 2007 Mr Turnbull and foreign minister Alexander Downer announced the Kalimantan project.

It was ambitious and hastily conceived, a core undertaking of the dwindling Howard government’s belated $200m Global Forests and Climate Partnership.

When Canberra marketed the KFCP concept to Jakarta, it was eagerly bought by Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s administration, ­agonising over Indonesia’s vast ­atmospheric output of carbon and the wildfires annually ravaging Kalimantan and Sumatra.

Both were consequences of massive, reckless clearance and drainage of carbon-loaded peat soil wetlands.

As first conceived, the project would rehabilitate 200,000ha of dried-out, highly combustible Central Kalimantan land, by blocking drainage canals to re-wet the soil and planting up to 100 million trees.

Additionally 70,000ha of ­still-forested peatland would be ­conserved.

Local communities were to be recruited as “forest stewards”, both to carry out land-works and stop environmentally damaging activities, compensated by performance-based payments.

Australia would help establish the Indonesian National Carbon Accounting System, raising Greens suspicion — never proved — that Canberra had a hidden plan to harvest carbon credits from Kalimantan. Like many projects in ­AusAID’s then heavily funded but often thin-spread Indonesian program, KFCP was intended to show Indonesians and other foreign aid partners how to do things well, in future on a bigger scale.

It envisaged $70m coming into the project from other sources, ­including companies engaged in Indonesia.

It was for a time “hailed as the world’s most advanced REDD-plus (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) demonstration activity”, records Mr Davies.

IAFCP came into being five months after the Kalimantan project was announced.

Standing beside Dr Yudhoyono this time was his new good friend and freshman prime minister Mr Rudd, hero of the recent Bali climate summit, with an even bigger vision of Indonesian aid.

Funding was ramped-up for Kalimantan and INCAS. A ­Sumatra conservation project was added.

At the end of 2010, IAFCP achieved peak funding, $100m with $47m allocated to ­Kalimantan.

But the ambition already had been quietly downgraded, partly because non-Canberra funding had failed to materialise.

The KFCP design document produced in mid-2009, though not published until years later, reduced peatland for rehabilitation by 75 per cent to 50,000ha and the area actually to be replanted with local trees became only 3000ha.

In 2011 the project came under severe criticism from environmental and development NGOs in Kalimantan and Australia, particularly for ignoring the needs and complaints of local Dayak communities.

Emerging difficulties in Central Kalimantan probably contributed to a decision later that year to cancel the $30m Sumatra project, in Jambi province, before any work started on the ground.

“It closed before they decided which area for the project,” said Mr Deddy.

By that stage also, he claimed, the Central Kalimantan project had lost the support of communities. “The canal-blocking was in the wrong places; one area would get really dry and another got flooded and that was the local people’s farming area,” he said.

“There was no consultation from local government — during the project, local governments still issued 15 concessions to palm oil companies and that meant the project took away more of the local people’s land.”

In February 2013, the Australian government told Indonesia that IAFCP would extend a year into last year but at much reduced levels of activity.

Mr Davies reports that within two more months foreign minister Bob Carr had agreed with his department to find an “exit strategy” from the whole undertaking.

In April 2013 canal-blocking stopped and, as Mr Davies noted, that meant KFCP was dead as a REDD-plus scheme.

Total funding for IAFCP was cut to $65m and in the May 2013 budget the program was ­de-funded. Some incidental community projects continued into last year.

Of 64 small canals marked for blocking in the Kalimantan plan, Mr Davies finds eight were fully blocked and 17 partially. Only 12 of 189 palisades to block a large waterway through the project area, known locally as Hell Canal, were built.

He reports some 2.6 million seedlings were raised by local communities and planted, though a 2012 study claimed only 50,000 trees were then planted and an ­article in The Australian said 1.2 million.

Australian assistance made a useful contribution to building ­Indonesia’s carbon accounting system, although it missed completion deadline.

KFCP generated a better understanding of REDD-plus processes and Indonesia’s capacity to use them, Mr Davies found.

There was “probably” substantial local economic development as a result of the project though it is unclear the benefits will persist in the long term.

However, Mr Davies’ report says, a coherent assessment of KFCP is “extraordinarily difficult” because so little government information has been allowed into the public domain.

WALHI’s Mr Deddy claims information wasn’t just a retrospective problem: “The whole reporting of the project was not transparent — what they put in reports was not what happened in the field.

“Learning from past mistakes, I think the most important thing is to communicate with local society; they have their traditional ways of keeping peatland wet.

“Projects like that should support the local communities, rather than intervene with concepts that are far from what local society is doing. Don’t just bring scientists to tell the local people what to do — listen to them and look at what they have done.”