ASEAN forum for an environmentally friendly future

By Jules Bell

JAKARTA (JP): Regional environmentally sustainable economic progress, Indonesia's rain forest and political will emerged as central issues on Monday at the First Konrad Adenauer Foundation Forum on Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN) Media and the Environment.

Held at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, the forum's participants included leading regional media professionals, ASEAN representatives and environmental experts.

Participants discussed current regional environmental issues and future strategies for governments and industry to avoid what the chairman of the Indonesian Biodiversity Foundation, Emil Salim, warned could be a "dirty Asia" in 2010.

"The world will depend on Asia for its environment," stressed Salim. The former state minister for the environment described Indonesia's 114 million hectares of rain forest as one of the three most important such natural resources in the world, alongside those in Brazil and Zaire.

In addition to its ecological value, Salim said a healthy Indonesian rain forest could ensure the nation and the ASEAN region a "competitive advantage" in the future, beyond the sale of wood to medicinal products. "The forest is more than just timber. It is medicine," he said.

The difficulty of ASEAN's role in reconciling regional aims and individual member practices, in the face of the association's policy of non-interference with neighbor countries, was an emergent theme using the haze from Indonesia's forest fires as a model.

ASEAN secretary general Rodolfo C. Severino said ministers had met and agreed to urge Indonesia to take action and punish the state companies responsible for the burning of the forests. ASEAN is yet to decide on how to enforce this he said, and resolve what he described as both a regional and "national issue".

"There is no alternative to regional cooperation," said Severino, in light of the haze's effect on neighboring countries. "Since it is a regional problem then a regional solution needs to be involved," he said.

Severino stressed the lack of, and need for a formal agreement from parties that the rest can evoke if a violation occurs, particularly considering that most environmental law is what he called "soft law".

Political will and a nation's capacity to enforce green practices was described by both Severino and Salim as interdependent.

"Political will is nothing if the enforcement capacity is not there," said Severino. Indonesia faces a difficult problem domestically, particularly with regard to its forests he said, because enforcement must reach from national policy into provincial political practices.

Following Severino, Salim said environmental matters are only discussed when they become issues, or when circumstances demand their attention.

"In many ASEAN member countries," he explained, "the environment is considered peripheral."

Salim said the focus of ASEAN countries on economic issues amid the region's financial crisis in recent years, had severely displaced efforts to promote environmentally responsible practices.

"Unemployment leads to civil disobedience," he said, and combined with corruption in government authorities and a lack of transparency had led to a "severe crisis of authority" in Indonesia. This had led to logging, burning and the "misuse of land" in rain forest areas for agricultural plantations he said.

Social pressure and the role of non-government organizations (NGO) are crucial to an environmentally sustainable future for ASEAN countries added Salim. Describing the relationship between social, environmental and economic factors as an integrated triangle, Salim promoted the "empowering of the civil society".

A weak civil society operating alongside a strong government and business sector is a recipe for failure in the pursuit of a greener future he argued.

Environmental resource management, clean technology and on- site attention involving consultation with experts, in conjunction with legal and moral regional benchmarks, were proposed by Salim as fundamental in any environmental strategy. "It is not being done, and it can be done," he said.

Jail for offenders and the actual prosecution of criminals were mechanisms for the successful enforcement of environmental laws he said. Using the forest fires as an example, which he said had to date cost Indonesia over US$7 billion, Salim lamented that Indonesia had "beautiful environmental laws", the enforcement of which he had never seen.

"The whole plantation development smells," he said in regard to the burning of forests. Salim said Indonesia's total rain forest area was theoretically divided into 66 million hectares for production, and 48 million hectares of protected forest. The reality of corruption and illegal logging was quite different he said.

"What is the normal logic?" he asked rhetorically, "that the illegal cutting is going into the 48 million hectares of protected forest." The forests are being logged well beyond the 29 million hectares per year quota he said.

"The reality is that the total cut is more than 29, you should add another 34 million hectares," he said, admitting: "Basically, there is no radical change in environmental policy."

Speaking from his experience with Indonesia's biodiversity, Salim placed the country's rain forest among the worlds most important nature reserves due to its wealth of birds, mammals and micro-organisms.

Another avenue for a cleaner future is the internalization of cost, environment competence and responsibility on the part of industry itself according to Richard Shephard, the deputy executive director of US-Asia Environmental Partnership (US-AEP).

Status as a leading economic and environmentally responsible company is not an oxymoron he said. In contrast, a company's economic management and success increasingly equates to its standards of environmental practices.

The aim of US-AEP in this context said Sheppard, is to promote the "exchange of technology and experience" because Asia in the 1990's "could be on the cusp of a clean revolution." In his opinion, no challenge for the future is greater than transforming the economy into one which is ecologically sustainable.

This challenge said Sheppard, is amid predictions that by 2010 Asia could produce half of all global carbon dioxide, half of all Asians will live in urban areas by 2020 and 80 percent of industry's production plants and infrastructure are yet to be built.

Optimistically, he said an increasing trend toward green practices does exist worldwide, including consumer dependent corporate images and the integration of environmentally friendly commercial purchasing and supply decisions for companies. Describing this as "greening the supply chain", Sheppard said companies gained numerous advantages from such an approach, all of which will become increasingly important in a more environmentally aware future.

Citing Nike as an example of companies he described as pro- active "environmental champions in Indonesia", Sheppard said the company had made environmental practices a priority, and had assisted suppliers in integrating acceptable environmental standards into their production processes.

The overall theme of the forum was the importance of regional cooperation and the political commitment of member countries to a greener future. Immediate financial gain at the expense of the environment would be tragic it emerged, considering both the ecological and economic advantages of these natural resources in the 21st century.