Indonesia’s 11^th hour?

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. On your left, the white column sticking out of the water is Monas. As we will be shortly landing at Depok International Airport, we ask that you fasten your seatbelt. For travelers wishing to continue their journey to what’s left of Jakarta, a Bluebird shuttle is available at Terminal A.” Is this our future, asks Marc-Antoine Dunais.

Could the above be one of the scenarios that crossed the mind of Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar when he walked up to the podium at a recent seminar and spoke of the coming submerging of Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport because of rising sea levels? 

"We will need to move the airport as it will be underwater by 2050 because of rising sea levels," the minister said, bringing up the specter of human-induced global warming.

For some, news of Jakarta going underwater may come as a relief. The problem is that the capital isn’t the only place in Indonesia that is likely to suffer from climate change. From coasts to mountains, deep waters to coral reefs, villages to cities, no part of the country is likely to be spared over the coming decades, humans included.

Indeed, climate change begins – and for better or worse, may end – with humans.  It’s the story of an accidental experiment where a smart primate successfully began to alter its natural environment at a planetary scale.

And like the kid who stares with a mixture of awe and disbelief at his dad’s car that he just smashed into a tree, the scale of what we have done is only beginning to seep in. The question is not if we’re headed for trouble, but how deep we’re going to sink into it.

Climate change redraws maps
When associated with climate change, the word “sinking” resonates deeply in Indonesia. Of the nation’s approximately 17,500 islands, many barely stick out of the water. With global warming on the surge and sea levels climbing, it is quite likely that maps of the country will have to be redrawn in the decades to come as islands go under.

These are not vague speculations by wide-eyed scientists with a penchant for sensationalism. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a scientific body set up by the UN to separate the wheat from the chaff in climate science (and there is a lot of chaff), recently stated to the world that climate change is unequivocal, and that carbon dioxide emissions will continue to contribute to warming and rising sea levels for more than a millennium.

Lost islands and submerged coastal cities may take decades to happen. What a growing number of people in Indonesia are concerned about is weird weather. As a Jakarta taxi driver recently put it, “cuaca lagi error” (an Anglicized version of “the weather’s screwed up”), followed by invectives against those who had strayed from the path of God and brought his wrath, leading the country to a coming doom (one, presumably, where a colossal tsunami wave swallows the archipelago in a great cathartic strike).

Cuaca lagi error… These words echo warning signals sent by reams of environmental data recorded by BMG, Indonesia’s Meteorological and Geophysical Agency. Across the archipelago, things are getting increasingly drier, with an average rainfall decrease of 2-3 percent during the last century, according to the UK’s Climatic Research Institute’s predictions for climate change in Indonesia.

As a result, droughts have intensified and so has the forest fire problem, already a major shard in Indonesia’s side. 

Droughts + fire = major pains
It took the massive environmental disaster of 1997/98 in Sumatra and Kalimantan to really drive that message home. In addition to slash-and-burn farming practices, freak weather conditions brought by El Niño – an episodic ocean-atmosphere process that has major effects on climate worldwide – set already dwindling forests and endangered wildlife ablaze, and made life miserable for millions of people.

Across the region, people donned masks and locked themselves indoors while planes were grounded for lack of visibility because of smog from fires. All this came with a hefty bill, not only for Indonesia, but also neighboring Malaysia and Singapore: an estimated US$1.3 billion, mainly due to a drop in tourism revenue and industrial production.

At sea, things have been little better. While corals are struggling to recover from coral bleaching inflicted by the last El Niño, ongoing weather irregularities are often forcing fishers to stay at port. According to Dr. Aryo Hanngono of the Marine Affairs and Fisheries Ministry, who reads Indonesia’s seas through a complex network of satellites and floating sensors, at least four cyclones have hit the southern Java seas this year until May 2007, which is way more than usual.

On an island recently rocked by tsunamis, it doesn’t take much to keep fishers on land, despite the economic costs of doing so.

Meanwhile, some rather dire scenarios are coming in about how climate change will make itself felt in the decades ahead. For instance, Jakarta residents can expect the city to be 5-15 percent drier in 2080, although this is unlikely to stop freak events such as flash floods from striking the city.

Escaping the country may not be such a viable option. Globally, even if all emission sources are held constant at year 2000 levels, a further warming trend would occur in the next two decades at a rate of about 0.1°C per decade. Hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation events will become more frequent.

In a study published last year, it was discovered that the drainage and burning of Indonesia’s peatlands is sending colossal amounts of greenhouse gases up into the sky – the same gases that are blamed for global warming and Indonesia’s recent spate of weather ills. Add to that air pollution caused by forest fires with plumes of smoke the size of small islands, and Indonesia’s role in climate change suddenly takes on a new dimension.

The dramatic news has not exactly sent Indonesia into a hysterical frenzy. “The concept of climate change is still novel at the governmental level,” according to Krisandini at Yayasan Pelangi, an Indonesian research institute. For Fitrian Ardiansyah of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), some foundations of climate change knowledge exist.

“Officials are beginning to be aware of the growing noise on climate change globally but for them there is still little correlation with the weather events happening across Indonesia.”  

Now, thanks to the concerted efforts of NGOs, research institutions and the media, the government is slowly waking to the reality that serious changes are afoot, and that sooner or later it will need to respond to them. Fifty percent of disasters that happened last year in Indonesia can be associated with climate-hydrological issues, says Fitrian. If the government takes preventive steps to mitigate the impacts, this would be more cost-effective than having to clean up the mess after weather calamities have happened.

Counting the options
Surprisingly, many of the options to reduce global warming in Indonesia are no-brainers (although they’re a pickle to put into practice). No more permits for companies to clear and burn native rainforests for plantations, which releases carbon dioxide; actually implement the forest ‘zero-burning policy’ policy; protect peatlands and rehabilitate deforested areas.

Communities in far-flung parts of the archipelago would be a whole lot better off if they were given some help to adapt to the changing weather. And coral reefs would be much more able to resist global warming if they weren’t blasted by dynamite fishing or destroyed by cyanide poisoning.

On the energy front, there’s a whole skew of steps the government could take to reduce ‘dirty energy’, such as scrapping the use of coal for electricity generation, and promoting a rather natural alternative – geothermal energy, which is available in abundance in Indonesia. Not that the government has been idle on small-scale renewable energy projects, but so far these have not shown great sustainability. Now, the new energy flavor of the month in Jakarta has got environmentalists up in arms: nuclear power, with plants being planned for earthquake-prone Java.

The necessary steps to cut global warming are environmental good practices, such as have been advocated for decades. But in this era of mounting frenzy on the issue, they are becoming increasingly urgent. If Indonesia wants to avoid staring at the world from below the sea in the centuries to come, this may be the time to take a second –and harder look – at deforestation, forest fires and industrial greenhouse gas emissions.

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