Indonesia Producing 2 Billion+ Tons CO2 Annually From Fires, Peatland Forest Destruction - BBC

[hatrack]

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According to the conservation organisation Wetlands International, 48% of the country's peatland forest has been deforested, and most of the rest degraded by illegal logging. And that has caused some major problems. Marcel Silvius, a senior programme manager for Wetlands International, believes we are looking at one of the biggest environmental disasters of our age.

"From the drainage of its peatlands alone," he told me, "Indonesia is producing 632 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. "But from its annual forest fires, it produces another 1,400 million tonnes. That's a total of 2,000 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. The Netherlands emits 80 million."

Indonesia's annual forest fires are a major problem, and have been increasing over recent years. Sometimes they are caused by companies wanting a fast, cheap way of clearing the land for planting. Sometimes, though, it is local villagers, eking out a living from small patches of land hewn out of the forest.

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Agus Purnomo, a senior official at Indonesia's environment ministry, believes there are two major causes of the problem - big companies and local farmers. For the big companies, the solution is to enforce the law, he said, and that is the easy part. "For the second problem, the issue we're confronting is poverty," he said. "To prevent people opening up peatlands for agriculture or whatever, we need to come up with development projects that directly benefit the local poor, and that is a challenge that has to be solved by the government as a whole."

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6354079.stm

[GliderGuider]

1. The Netherlands has exported their CO2 production to Indonesia

Isn't that nice of them?

Once a dream fuel, palm oil may be an eco-nightmare

Just a few years ago, politicians and environmental groups in the Netherlands were thrilled by the early and rapid adoption of "sustainable energy," achieved in part by coaxing electricity plants to use biofuel -- in particular, palm oil from Southeast Asia.

Spurred by government subsidies, energy companies became so enthusiastic that they designed generators that ran exclusively on the oil, which in theory would be cleaner than fossil fuels like coal because it is derived from plants.

But last year, when scientists studied practices at palm plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia, this green fairy tale began to look more like an environmental nightmare.

Rising demand for palm oil in Europe brought about the clearing of huge tracts of Southeast Asian rainforest and the overuse of chemical fertilizer there.

Worse still, the scientists said, space for the expanding palm plantations was often created by draining and burning peatland, which sent huge amounts of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

Factoring in these emissions, Indonesia had quickly become the world's third-leading producer of carbon emissions that scientists believe are responsible for global warming, ranked after the US and China, according to a study released in December by researchers from Wetlands International and Delft Hydraulics, both in the Netherlands.

[jwirr]

2. Wouldn't Indonesia be prefect for solar and wind energy? Why is

no developed nation working with them to develope it?