In between the nonstop television news coverage of the Jakarta floods this week was a report from Australia about a man plucked from a tree by a helicopter as floodwaters raged below. The contrast was stunning: a single man rescued in Queensland while hundreds of flood victims in Jakarta have been trapped in their houses for days.
It is often said that life is cheap in this country. More than 50 people have died in the flooding in this city of 10 million. Three-fourths of the city, which is about the size of Singapore, has resembled a giant lake for a week, with water reaching heights of three meters in some parts.
As is their habit, officials were soon slinging mud. Jakarta officials blamed regional officials for cutting down trees in the mountains to make way for villas, while regional officials blamed Jakarta officials for turning the capital into a forest of concrete.
If the past is any guide, not much will be learned from these latest floods. Layers of faulty policies have stacked up in recent decades, and new layers will be added because nobody is ever held accountable.
While preoccupied with its own urban woes, Jakarta has lagged behind in responding to a spate of recent reports on climate change. The Stern Report issued by the UK government in October failed to jolt anybody here.
Named after Britain's development economist and former chief economist at the World Bank, Sir Nicholas Stern, the report says that "our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity later this century and in the next on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the twentieth century".
This would certainly be a catastrophe of a much greater proportion than our floods in Jakarta.
Stern argues that spending large sums of money now on measures to reduce carbon emissions will bring dividends on a colossal scale. It would be wholly irrational, therefore, not to spend this money, he says.
In December, researchers from Wetlands International and Delft Hydraulics, both in the Netherlands, announced that Indonesia is the world's third leading producer of the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming, after the United States and China. The majority of the carbon dioxide does not come from vehicles or industries, like in the US and China, but from the annual forest fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan.
The researchers said the drive to obtain biofuel had caused huge tracts of Southeast Asian rain forest to be razed and the overuse of chemical fertilizers.
Scientists also have learned that biofuels may sometimes produce more harmful emissions than the fossil fuels they replace. This has forced many countries to rethink their billions of dollars in subsidies for what were until recently considered "eco-friendly" fuels.
The International Herald Tribune reported this week that global warming will continue for hundreds of years and that human activity is "very likely" to blame. The bleak warning came from a leading international network of climate change scientists.
And the United Nations' Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change said in Paris on Feb. 2 that global warming was caused by human activity, causing a rise in the number of heat waves, more extreme storms and droughts, as well as ocean warming and changing wind patterns.
Although there are scientists who contest these reports, prepared by more than 2,500 scientists from some 130 countries, it is high time for the Indonesian government to look into them very closely. At the very least it should summon the nation's best scientists to explore the issue. Due its sheer size and its vast tropical forests, second only to Brazil's, Indonesia plays a crucial role in the global climate.