$4.4b up in smoke due to 'poor govt policy'
JAKARTA (JP): Two international environmental organizations charged yesterday that poorly designed government policy helped escalate last year's calamitous forest fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan which, according to fresh estimates, caused US$4.4 in damages.
A report released by the Singapore-based Economy and Environment Program for Southeast Asia (EEPSEA) and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said the estimate was "conservative" since it excluded immeasurable factors such as the long-term impact on health and biodiversity loss.
"The tragedy is that these fires were largely preventable," WWF forest conservation advisor Togu Manurung said in a statement received here yesterday.
"Tropical rain forests don't burn easily, even under drought conditions. Indonesian forests have been degraded by years of poor forestry practices, that's why they are so susceptible to fires set by people."
Timothy Jessup, WWF's senior policy advisor in Jakarta, pointed to a series of poorly designed policies which actually helped fan the fires.
These include a program to drain and convert one million hectares of peat forest for rice cultivation. Fires in these former wetlands have been the most difficult to extinguish and created haze laden with sulfuric acid.
Unclear land ownership laws encouraged people and companies to clear land as a way of staking a claim and they used fire for the task.
He also noted that policies which kept the prices of wood supplied to processing mills low, provided little incentive to protect standing timber or to sell scrap wood rather than burn it.
Furthermore, it was noted that short-term leases of forest land to timber companies also left little incentive for sustainable management.
"Changing these policies should be front and center in the new government's reform program," Jessup said.
The EEPSEA/WWF report put fire-related losses at $3 billion, while the haze-related impact was estimated at over $1.4 billion.
"This is more than the damages assessed for the Exxon Valdez oil spill and India's Bhopal chemical spill combined," EEPSEA director David Glover said referring to two past major environmental disasters.
"The resources lost would have been more than enough to provide basic sanitation, water sewage services for Indonesia's 120 million rural poor."
The principal fire-related damages include $493 million in timber losses, $470 million in foregone agricultural production, $1.8 billion in ecological services provided to the people by forests such as water supply, food and medicine, and another $272 million for the contribution to global warming from the release of carbon.
"While global warming will be felt by the rest of the world, the other fire damages were suffered mainly by Indonesia itself," the EPSEA/WWF statement said.
More than five million hectares of forest, plantation, and land in Indonesia were razed by the fires last year. Over 70 million people throughout the Southeast Asia region were affected by the resulting haze.
The method used to calculate the damages was derived from satellite mapping studies of razed forests in Sumatra and Kalimantan by the National University of Singapore's Center for Remote Imaging, Sensing and Processing (CRISP), with adjustments by EEPSEA and WWF for areas burned outside the provinces.
These were then calculated with per hectare values for various vegetation types and land uses. (aan)