RI's pollution control reflects only half truth of things

RI's pollution control reflects only half truth of things

By Jaseentha L. D'silva

BANDUNG (JP): There can be little doubt that Indonesia's impressive economic growth rates over the last three decades have given it a place among the most successful developing economies in the world today.

Its success, however, has not come without its problems. This is clearly evidenced by Indonesia's continuing struggle to strike a judicious balance between economic growth and protection of its environment.

With a lean towards industrialization and manufacturing industries to facilitate national growth and development, the country faces some of the most critical challenges associated with pollution control.

Effective measures aimed at industrial pollution control must, in the first place, be based on the magnitude of the pollution problem itself. Policies must reflect the true nature of the problem. But trying to determine just how critical the problem of industrial pollution really is in Indonesia has itself been fraught with both technical and institutional difficulties.

Although extensive research efforts have already been made to ascertain industrial pollution levels in Indonesia, only a small proportion of those efforts have been able to generate reliable data.

Part of the problem lies in the issues traditionally associated with pollution control in developing countries -- insufficient knowledge, skills and technology to tackle the issue at hand.

In industrialized countries, most of the input data for calculating industrial pollution levels is based on the data of individual firms, which is normally available in government departments.

Firms are required by very stringent regulations to disclose necessary data on their pollution discharge levels to government on a regular basis. The data is very often subject to verification by government officials using standard procedures. Pollution levels are then calculated using the verified data.

In the case of Indonesia, the approach used to determine pollution levels involves a heavy reliance by government on firms to provide very accurate data.

For the Indonesian government, the sheer number of manufacturing firms operating in Indonesia has greatly exacerbated the problem of creating a large enough pool of expertise to provide assistance to firms in gathering the required pollution data.

Added to this is the problem of fluid shifts in manufacturing emphasis necessitating continual corresponding shifts in expertise to keep up with new growth trends within the sector.

That said, accurate levels of pollution are without a doubt difficult to determine: So pollution control policies, at their best, only partially reflect the true nature of things.

Even bearing in mind this general problem, what data is available on pollution, coupled with statistics on growth trends, clearly demonstrates the critical state of things.

In the last 20-year period alone, national industrial output multiplied eight-fold and the World Bank estimates that it will expand another 13-fold by the year 2020.

Contributions to national output from the heavily-polluting manufacturing sector grew from 13 percent in the 1970s to 23 percent in the 1980s, with a projected overall share of 33 percent in the 1990s and 45 percent in the decade following it.

Although World Bank projections suggest that the likely gradual shifts in the sectoral composition of the manufacturing sector from the more polluting processing industries to the less polluting assembly-type industries will help decrease the levels of certain pollutants, this shift will still not be sufficient to off-set the pollution generated by the overall rapid increase in industrial output.

Such a shift in the manufacturing sector of Java, for example, which is home to about 70 percent of all manufacturing industry, will only manage to achieve a 10-percent drop in overall industrial pollution share between now and 2020.

But the reality of the pollution crisis is best captured by looking at the projections for the absolute levels of industrial pollution. Assuming everything else is held constant, the Bank estimates that Java's absolute pollution level, despite changes to the sectoral composition of its manufacturing industry, will increase to 10 times its current level over the same period.

Taking into account that many of the industries which are currently expanding are those which tend to generate some of the most toxic kinds of pollutants, projected figures for industrial pollution levels only tell part of the story behind the pollution dilemma.

For example, 40 percent of the total pollution in Indonesia's rivers is thought to originate from industrial sources. However, this figure does not account for the concentrations of many toxic wastes such as mercury and chromium discharged by firms.

Not only is this an example of a conservative estimate of pollution levels, but it in no way reflects the far more harmful industrial pollutants that are increasingly being discharged. And given industrial growth trends and projections for Indonesia, World Bank data suggests that such bio-accumulative metals can be expected to be 50-times higher in 2020 than their levels in 1980.

Thus it is particularly important that results of future research on pollution capture, not only the real magnitude of the problem, but the intensification of the pollution crisis as well.

The writer is attached to the Center for Environmental Studies at the Bandung Institute of Technology.