Indonesia and Global Warming Discourse: Some Challenges Agenda after the Kyoto Protocol Ratification

It is evidence that when we enter to new millennium of 21st century we come together with a new regime of global environmental change one of which called global warming. The anthropogenic activities particularly green house gases (GHG) emission vouch for this and has been identified as a driving factor to the climate change. The serious adverse effect has been predicted such as heat waves, tropical cyclones, intense rainfall, flooding, salinization, sea-level rise, etc., that not only cover the natural ecosystem but also human society (IPCC, 2001). Thus, global community is paying more attention and spends much more energy, time, and even money to combat this change. There are two main key issues to fight for it: 1) reducing the cause and impact (mitigation effort); and 2) fostering the adaptation strategy, that both need a global partnership and cooperation.

As the country placed the fourth biggest population in the world, it also contributed 1.34 percent of world total emission (rank no. 18 in 2002) and its emission growth to reach 3.6 per year until 2025 (above China, India, Mexico, and Brazil growth) (CAIT, 2006), Indonesia might play important role to hand in hand combat the climate change. Thus, since 24 June 2004 Indonesia ratified a Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) and promulgated it to the Law no. 17/2004.

Soon after ratifying the protocol, a national dialog held to find the answer to the question of what next agenda. This dialog come to end with several immediate actions including 1) legalizing the National Commission of Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), 2) improving the capacity for all stakeholders, 3) increasing the participation in international negotiations, 4) developing a national database, and 5) actively searching opportunities of international funding for CDM (Napitupulu, 2004). Currently, some initial projects on CDM have also expanded. Nevertheless, behind all those agenda, there still some urgent and challenging questions left such as: what is the urgency of such protocol for Indonesia now? How about the sector economy growth, how much will it be effected by the duty on such protocol in the next future? How to keep economy growth more while emit less at same time? Indeed, I realized that those questions are crucial when currently we face complex economic problems. This short paper will not answers to all those questions as I just want to share some issues relate to the vulnerability of this environmental changing to the Indonesian archipelagos.

Geographically, 75% of Indonesian region is ocean. As the country comprised of 17,504 inlands and coastline over 81,000 km made Indonesia as one of the biggest archipelagos countries in the world. As the current consciousness to empower the ocean, the current development has also begun to shift from inland-base to coastal-marine-base. Thus, since the establishment of ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries in 1999, the central government expenditure for this sector remarkable increased from only 70 billion rupiah in 1999 to 2.02 trillion rupiah in 2004. This figure at minimum figure out the hope to mainstreaming the economic development from these resources.

However, the hope is facing a great challenges of high poverty rate in the coastal areas, the deterioration of coastal environmental quality, heavily exploitation of fishery resources, and inappropriate legal framework, etc. Moreover, the current coastal area in developing countries such Indonesia might become more vulnerable to the climate change due to 1) most of productive-base activities for people in this area is natural resources-climate change dependent (such as agriculture, aquaculture, and fisheries); 2) there is also another prove that the poorest of the poor is living in the rural coastal area in which they also link to the natural resources that come to limit to grow such as fishery resources (the poverty headcount index of fishers based on Statistics Indonesia (2004) reach 28, above national PHI 18) ; and 3) those people also has lower financial, technical, and institutional capacity to adapt to such change. Thus, rethinking current coastal development is required. Indeed, such opportunity is there when currently representative house (DPR) is preparing the law on coastal management.

The sectors above share majority of GHG emission in Indonesia. When deforestation is still occurring in rate of 1.2% per year because of illegal lodging, land use change, and forest fires (Tanujaya, 2004), the emission reduction from the activities heavily depend on the strong goodwill of the government. While from the energy sector, as the oil still becomes the major source of energy (63 percent of the final consumption), diversifying energy use is becoming one important problem for current Indonesia.　Even in the long-term government is targeting to reduce oil sharing to 26.2 percent of total energy consumption and raised the share of gas and coal to 64.3% in 2025 (geothermal and renewable energy for remaining), indeed, it is not an easy way to achieve.

As the dominant sector in which accommodate most of the labor force, even its share to GDP decreased from 51% in 1965 to only 16% in 1996, this sector is high vulnerable to the climate change as it is climate change dependent activities. Adaptive technology is required for example to adapt to drought or to the salinization of the land in the coastal area. The aim of such policy is of course to ensure the food security and even more the sustainability of the rural area.
Finally, even there still so many problems and challenges after the ratification of Kyoto Protocol, and even we currently also face so many problems of social economic, the consciousness and commitment to hand in hand to combat the risk or vulnerability of climate change is few of essential duty for us.

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