Collective action needed to save natural resources

Collective action needed to save natural resources

The Earth Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, which concluded
earlier this month, has once again alerted the world to the
impact of environmental destruction on human lives. Former
Indonesian minister for the environment Emil Salim, chairman of
the preparatory committee of the summit, related his
environmental vision to The Jakarta Post's Dadan Wijaksana and
Musthofid on how Indonesia has to pursue the summit consensus and
carry on with its attempt to avert further losses of its natural
resources, especially its forests. The following is an excerpt of
the interview:

Question: Why are Indonesia's forests prey to such a speedy pace
of deforestation?

Answer: Let's put the issue this way. Despite a campaign for
environmentally healthy development, many seem to have defied it.
That's inevitably associated with the way of thinking about
economic development. People exploit natural resources to an
extreme degree for commercial benefit, without being aware of the
urgency of preserving them.

Q: What does the forest offer that is vital to the people but
which the market fails to recognize?

A: What is overlooked by the market is the benefit that people
get from the forest, as an absorber of CO2, clean air filter, as
a water catchment and on dwellings. To sum up, the environment --
along with poverty -- provides benefits, but these evaporate
because they are hard to quantify.

Q: Why didn't we start taking account of the noncommercial value
of the forest, which appears to have left an impact on our
failure to address it?

A: In the 1950s, Indonesia had a population of only 50 million.
Sumatra, Sulawesi and Irian Jaya were only sparsely inhabited. So
was the rest of the world. It was virtually empty. Given their
abundance, natural resources were apparently not a constraint.
However, in the following 50 years, Indonesia's population rose
from 50 million to 210 million. Likewise, the world's population.
All of a sudden, every space on earth seems to be densely
inhabited. Despite rapid change, we seem to be indifferent to the
need to keep up with it, as seen from the way we formulated our
development paradigm.

Q: What are we supposed to do to keep abreast of the changes?

A: The paradigm or our vision of development has to be changed
accordingly. We are now aware that we have lost something, but
only recently. Only now do we see the severely damaged natural
resources as a constraint. It has become an issue that is not
only of concern but also threatens our lives.

Q: In relation to the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, what
consensus did the world adopt to cope with natural resources-
related issues?

A: That's part of a sustainable development program, which
inherently contains three interdependable ingredients -- society,
economy and the environment. Speaking about the environment, we
must save the support system for life itself. What should we
save? The atmosphere? Otherwise, we must brace ourselves for
global warming (one cause of which is deforestation), which could
mean a global temperature increase of 3 degrees Celsius by 2100.
The equatorial countries would suffer from a drastic increase in
sea level, which would result in the disappearance of half of the
17,000 islands in the Pacific. Increased temperatures during the
dry season would subsequently hasten evaporation of surface
water. During the rainy season, with a massive amount of
rainfall, flooding would be unavoidable, especially in low-lying
areas like Bangladesh and the northern part of Java. As a result
of temperature increases, agricultural production would be
chaotic. The impact would be very severe.

Q: How should the world move to reach sustainable development?

A: The Johannesburg Summit was resolute that the world must
collectively drive forward with a new approach of
multilateralism, instead of unilateralism, in the sense that
global issues should not be considered the responsibility of one
country to resolve, but the whole world's. Let us join forces
together.

Q: How could we best use the Johannesburg consensus in our own
cause of protecting Indonesia's natural resources, especially in
the case of rampant illegal logging, where it is believed that
collusion and corruption are still plaguing efforts to overcome
them?

A: We can turn to multilateralism. We can optimize multilateral
cooperation to give a boost to our efforts. Pressures on the
government from international institutions like the UN
Development Program (UNDP), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and
the World Bank deserve to be pursued further. Don't expect too
much from the government. We are talking about a ten-year program
from 2002 to 2012. It's high time we did it in a "total football"
way. What does that mean? Development is not a monopoly of the
government but also involves stakeholders. They consist of nine
groups, namely youth and children, women, farmers, laborers,
businesses, academics, local administrations, indigenous people
and non-governmental organizations (NGO). I prefer to trust these
elements of civil society to help solve our forest problems. I
suggest, as a follow-up action from the Johannesburg Summit, the
government set up an independent team involving such elements of
civil society.