Mega to sign RI plan to implement Jo'burg Summit
Mega to sign RI plan to implement Jo'burg Summit
Muninggar Sri Saraswati, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
President Megawati Soekarnoputri is expected to sign on Wednesday next week the national commitment in compliance with the agreement made in the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development.
Masnellyarti Hilman, the deputy for technical facilities management at the environment ministry, said the national declaration would spell out the government's political will to implement the outcomes of the Johannesburg summit, the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the 1972 Human and Environment Summit in Stockholm.
The signing, to take place in Yogyakarta, will mark Indonesia's agreement to carry out economic and social development while preserving the environment for the sake of future generations.
"Indonesia must start to implement the sustainable development policy, otherwise, there will be no hope for the country," Masnellyarti told a press conference on Thursday.
She said by signing the national declaration, Indonesia could eventually become a middle-income country, by showing improvement in the human development index, getting better marks on the corruption perception index, improving competitiveness and halving the level of pollution and environmental damage.
The declaration will also stipulate that the sustainable development principles will be implemented in 12 major sectors, including poverty reduction, good governance, civil society, education, water resources, energy and mineral resources, health, agriculture, environmental protection and finance.
In the declaration, Indonesia will acknowledge its failure to implement the Indonesia Agenda-21, which was launched in 1999 to implement the guidelines set forth in the Rio summit, due to a lack of political will.
"But, echelon 1 officials from all ministries have agreed to implement the sustainable development principles prior to the national declaration," Masnellyarti vowed.
Several ministries have been known to fight with each other in pursuing their respective development targets recently.
One such case is the major road construction plan, which will cut through a pristine and protected forest in Aceh and has sparked a quarrel between the environment minister and the forestry minister on one hand and the settlement and the regional infrastructure minister on the other hand.
The forestry minister, the environment minister, the mineral and energy resource minister and the state minister for the acceleration of development in eastern Indonesia have also been in a dispute over the open pit mining issue in protected forests.
The declaration of the Johannesburg summit in 2002 is said to have failed to produce a concrete and comprehensive action plan to execute the 1992 Rio summit declaration, which concluded that economic, social and environmental concerns were inescapably interlinked with world development.