Pledge to save forests needs dust off
Pledge to save forests needs dust off
Berni K. Moestafa, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Former state minister of environment Emil Salim, who went to
the Rio de Janeiro world summit in 1992, must be disappointed.
Not only has the government failed to follow up its pledges
under the Rio declaration, forests are disappearing faster today
than at anytime in the past.
Experts said Indonesia will have to revive its 10-year-old
pledge at upcoming talks on sustainable development, as rapid
deforestation would render new commitments useless.
"I don't see much use of any summit if we don't stick to their
agreements," said Tedjo Wahyu Jatmiko of Konphalindo, a
consortium promoting forest conservation.
The second summit on sustainable development will be held in
Johannesburg, South Africa from late August to September.
Over the next two weeks Bali will hold the final round of
talks to produce the draft of the agreement that world leaders
will sign in Johannesburg.
Tedjo said he hoped the preparatory meeting in Bali would
restore the government's commitment, and this time for good.
"I have yet to see the impact of the Rio declaration we agreed
to 10 years ago," he said.
In 1992 at Rio de Janeiro, the United Nations Conference on
Environment and Development -- known as the Earth Summit --
adopted a declaration outlining countries' rights and
responsibilities towards the environment.
Participants also adopted Agenda 21: a blueprint for greener
development in the 21st century.
In 1997 Indonesia set up its national Agenda 21, covering
sectors like energy, mining, human settlement and forestry.
However efforts to break down the agenda into supporting
regulations in the forestry sector have came to nothing.
"I once asked officials about the agenda, and no one appears
to have heard of it," Tedjo said.
Instead forest exploitation has gone from bad to worse.
Indonesia is home to the world's second largest area of
tropical forests: 108.5 million hectares.
But with between 1.6 million to 2.1 million hectares of
forests disappearing each year, deforestation here ranks among
the fasted in the world, according to the Ministry of Forestry.
It is the result of a 40-year-old policy that puts forest
sustainability behind short-term economic goals.
While revenue flows, trees disappear. Kalimantan's forests
could vanish in nine years, Sumatra's lowland forests in four,
according to the World Bank projection.
The government estimates 294 flora and fauna species are
threatened by the rapid deforestation.
Humans too feel the consequence as is evident in the rising
incidents of landslides and flooding.
The latter hit Jakarta early this year, killing at least 45
people and displacing thousands of others for weeks.
In danger is also the future of around 60 million people whose
life depends on forest resources, according to the World Bank.
Resource scarcity has led to increased conflicts among forest
communities. Looting intensified in forest areas owned by timber
operations.
Tedjo said Agenda 21 was meant to anticipate these problems.
But of the various sectors the national agenda outlines and
the government followed up on, only the forestry sector was left
without the needed regulations, he said.
"This (Johannesburg summit) has always been viewed as a
project of the Ministry of Environment, so I guess they failed to
secure the support of other ministries, including the Ministry of
Forestry."
Outside the government, business interests more often than
not, work against sustainable forest management efforts.
To be sure, the forestry industry shares the same concern of
preserving forest areas to ensure long term supply.
But the ongoing mass conversion of forest for production shows
quicker ways exist to cover the question of supply.
Concerns over replenishment have also become more immediate.
In one example, Asia's largest pulp and paper concern outside
Japan, the Singapore based Asia Pulp & Paper Company Ltd. (APP)
scrambles to secure more trees for its giant mills in Indonesia.
With US$13.9 billion in debts it cannot pay, pressure mounts
for APP to increase output to make any debt restructuring
proposals look feasible.
APP's case may be extreme, but supply shortfalls plague many
others in the industry and undermine their current commitment to
sustainable forest management.
And while the forestry industry at least takes part in the
discussion on sustainable development, illegal loggers do not.
Their foray into Indonesian forests go unabated. The World
Bank said Indonesia was loosing $600 million a year from the
illegal export of timber.
Environmentalists valued the annual loss at Rp 3 trillion
(about $3.2 billion), and called this a conservative estimate.
There is suspicion local companies, faced with a supply
shortfall at home, resort to importing back Indonesian timber
that was illegally exported to Malaysia. Others derive their
supply from illegal loggers.
Against this multitude of problems, the draft sets out a new
approach towards forestry management through five steps.
They include reaching a national consensus for the creation of
an overarching forest management policy; revising laws and
regulations with greater public participation; empowering
indigenous people of the forests in the planning and
implementation and evaluation of forest management policies.
But for this to happen, Indonesia's overall stance towards
sustainable development must become stronger, said environmental
expert Mas Achmad Santosa.
"There must be an emphasize on good governance. The absence of
this has been the weakness of the Rio declaration," he said.
According to him, good governance implies the presence of a
civil society.
Political and social reforms following the 1997 economic
crisis paved the way for a civil society to emerge, said the
government in a draft statement about the national Agenda 21.
"The multi-fold crisis that hit Indonesia in 1997 is a
valuable lesson which serves as a wake-up call on the
unsustainability of our development program," it said.
Let's hope this lesson will stick when Indonesia commits
itself again towards sustainable forest management in
Johannesburg.