The world has reached a climatic tipping point. Al Gore has
spoken, scientists have reported, governments have listened
and pronounced, while corporate titans have worked out ways
to live with, if not profit, from global warming. It is now
generally accepted that we are all in trouble, potentially
serious trouble, unless radical steps are immediately taken
to slow and progressively reverse global warming. Only the
most diehard contrarian scientists and greediest businessmen
continue to deny the reality of our global predicament. Today
the debate has moved on to what needs to be done. And so the
world beats a path to Bali to map out its post-Kyoto future.
“If things go wrong in Bali, we are in deep trouble”,
says Yvo de Boer, Executive Director of the UN Framework Convention
on Climate Change. Co-Nobelist award winners with Al Gore,
the UN’s panel of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warn starkly, “if we
are to avert catastrophic climate change carbon (CO2) emissions
need to peak in the next 10 to 15 years and fall from that
time on.”
Palm Oil: Eco Villain or Hero?
How appropriate then that the UNFCCC takes place here in Indonesia
and specifically on Bali, one of the nation’s 38 provinces
and its most well known. Indonesia is South East Asia’s
biggest economy and richest by far in natural resources. Along
with Brazil, Zaire and certain other equatorial countries
Indonesia possesses most of the earth’s remaining tropical
rain forest. But for how long? Indonesia has the second fastest
rate of deforestation after Brazil. Since 2000 it destroys
an annual average of 1.44 billion hectares of forest or a
country the size of Switzerland say Greenpeace and UN Food
& Agriculture Organisation (UNFAO). At this rate Indonesia
could lose the rest of its remaining forest within 15 years.
The net result is that through deforestation and peatland
destruction Indonesia, a developing country that would normally
rank 41st has become the third largest producer of carbon
emissions after industrial giants, the US and China.
Indonesia knows it’s in the eco dog house and not just
from easily dismissed critics from developed countries, who
long ago cut down their trees and are major carbon emitters.
No, it’s also getting stick from its ASEAN neighbours
for the haze from countless forest fires set to clear land
for palm oil. Malaysian interests having destroyed most of
their forests in Sarawak and Sabah now eye Indonesia’s.
They promise massive wealth and over a million jobs as Indonesia
takes over the mantle of No.1 producer of palm oil. All this,
and it’s eco-friendly too, they say. Palm oil for bio-fuel
is good, right? Not if it’s not sustainable, it’s
not. It’s actually a lot worse than burning fossil fuels.
And the way these Malaysian and Indonesian plantation owners
have played this game is anything but sustainable. The few
Indonesians who actually do get jobs won’t have them
for very long, the money will disappear into the pockets of
the already filthy rich, with a little of it filtering down
to corrupt officials. Within a few years the land will become
denatured and lie abandoned.
As UNFCCC host and anticipating some awkward criticism, Indonesia’s
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono came up with the REDD plan,
which he will present in Bali, to reduce emissions from deforestation
in developing countries, whereby Indonesia and 10 other forest
nations would be paid by the developed world not to destroy
their forests and peatland. If adopted, Indonesia could earn
up to US$15 billion a year to conserve its remaining forests.
This is not only fair, since it is the industrialised nations
that got us into this pickle anyway, but it is also potentially
one of the most dramatically effective means we have of reducing
carbon emissions globally. So what’s the snag?
Nice One Bambang, but will it run?
Well, the rhino in the UNFCCC break out rooms is the awkward
fact that few , including many Indonesians, believe their
government can deliver. Law enforcement is very weak in Indonesia,
corruption remains virtually uncontrollable, security forces
have been involved in illegal logging and Indonesia’s
Supreme Court takes action against corrupt judges or powerful
political figures. As if to underline the point last month
comes the Adelin Lis case, where one of Indonesia’s
most egregious accused illegal loggers in West Sumatra’s
Riau province gets let off the hook by both the country’s
judges, but also the Forestry Ministry itself.
Despite the apparent hopelessness of the situation all is
not entirely lost. In fact progress is being made. Most Indonesians
believe that President Yudhoyono is doing what he can to rein
in corruption and combat illegal logging and deforestation,
that steady if not dramatic progress to this end is being
made.This may not be just a fond hope. Practical and convincing
evidence of an end to illegal logging in parts of Kalimantan
is surfacing. The huge wooden pilings from the many river
pier heads is now being offered for sale to the construction
industry all over Indonesia. Clear evidence perhaps that in
some parts of Indonesia at least the infrastructure for logging
extraction is being dismantled.
If Indonesia and the other forest countries are to keep any
forest at all it means the developed world will not only need
to pay them not to destroy their trees, it means they will
need to keep them honest. The best way of doing that is not
just by effectively monitoring them, but by keeping the world’s
multinationals like Unilever, Nestlé and Procter &
Gamble honest too. After all it is they and companies like
them, who buy the palm oil from the producing countries. It
is they who drive the market and it is up to them to ensure
the producers do so in a genuinely sustainable way. Ultimately
that means that we the general public, need to be aware of
what’s really going on, insisting on true not ersatz
sustainability and punishing offending suppliers at the cash
register.
Who’s Looking Out for Bali?
Meantime what of Bali? The magical and mystical isle once
described by Nehru back in the 1950’s as ”the
morning of the world”. The freshness is still there
but you’ll need to travel a bit to find it, and it’s
definitely under threat. In July of this year readers of upmarket
US travel magazine “Travel Leisure” voted Bali
the “Best island “ in the world for the sixth
year in a row. This November, in the run up to UNFCCC Bali,
a panel of over one hundred environmental and travel experts
in a survey conducted by the National Geographic Traveller
declared that Bali was ecologically “in trouble”,
albeit moderate.
If Bali no longer has its forests, they came for the big trees
long ago, its environmental and social problems have many
of the same origins as the rest of the country. Whatever fine
words and sentiments have been uttered about maintaining the
cultural integrity on Bali, whatever excellent laws have been
passed to protect Bali, and there have been many, the essential
fact is that tourism development has been allowed to go ahead
more or less at will, with little concern for the environmental
effects.
The main reason for this is the centralised nature of Indonesia’s
late New Order government who held power for over 30 years.
Most Balinese feel that Jakarta has little empathy or concern
for Bali, seeing it only as a ready source of tourism dollars.
The Suharto family and cronies certainly forced through and
benefited from every tourism venture of any size on the island,
including some environmentally catastrophic mega projects.
It is of course easy to point at Suharto family greed, but
this is just the most obvious manifestation. Every day, in
big and small ways, existing laws put there to protect the
beauty, cultural integrity and environment of Bali are flouted
by Javanese, Balinese and foreigners alike.
The choice for the Balinese and anyone involved or cares about
Bali is simple and stark. We need to follow the rules in letter
and spirit. If we do that Bali can prosper and still retain
its beauty and soul. if we do not, it will become a befouled
theme park, a sad ghost of what it once was. Apart from enforcing
regulation, the way forward is obvious. Greater financial
autonomy for Bali. That way an elected Governor of the province
can spread the wealth throughout the island, without it all
being given over to tourism. Visitors to Bali can help too,
by finding out who the environmental good and bad guys are
and placing their business accordingly.
Where’s the Waste Going? Ask your GM....
Here’s one for all UNFCCC delegates and hangers on staying
in the Nusa Dua enclave. Be sure to ask your hotel GM where
their solid and other wastes are going? Expensive hotels tend
to make a song and dance about how green they are. Well, good
for them! But how far does it go? Many of Nusa Dua’s
hotels simply truck their wastes back of house as it were
and dump it in the little mangrove swamp remaining in Benoa
harbour, badly polluting both land and sea.
What better moment in time for Nusa Dua’s 5-star hotelier’s
to take a giant eco-step forward than now, when the eyes of
the worlds environmentally great and the good are on Bali?
