APSN Banner

El Nino: a case for improved land management

Source
Sydney Morning Herald - September 20, 1997

The health of millions of Indonesians - and of people in neighbouring countries - is threatened by the smoke from blazing forests. As Louise Williams reports, Jakarta not only has to cope with the crisis, but stop it happening again.

"Every nation will have its day of reckoning," Indonesia's besieged Environment Minister, Sarwono Kusumaatmadja, warned this week as vast clouds of smoke from thousands of fires raging in Indonesia's forests choked the region. The warnings of a serious environmental crisis had been there, he conceded.

"But we were operating on business as usual; we ignored the warnings with dire consequences," he said. "Now Indonesia is facing a disaster scenario; it is a warning for other nations not to be complacent."

As far north as the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur the pollution index breached the 300 mark on several days this week on a scale that sets 100 as a safe limit. School children were fitted with masks, the elderly told to stay indoors and tens of thousands of workers advised to take annual leave allowances now and get their children out of the country.

Indonesia has no pollution monitoring equipment, so the measurements of the crisis are crude. In the worst-hit areas of Sumatra and Kalimantan day has turned into night as cars crawl along the roads headlights glaring. Millions cough and choke, their eyes smarting, dizziness and nausea accompanying their daily routines.

On Wednesday this week, visibility hit zero in the town of Rengat on Sumatra, where some 50,000 people live, and Sarwono said he was advising immediate evacuations.

"I feel sick all over my body, I feel like vomiting. When I go outside, even in a car, my eyes smart," said one Rengat resident contacted by telephone. "Sometimes we can't see anything at all," said another. "The children have breathing problems, the smoke is stinging our eyes and accidents happen because we can't see."

Rengat and most of the worst-affected towns are now virtually cut off, the airports closed and the roads and rivers perilous.

At least 20 million Indonesians are exposed to dangerous air pollution levels and tens of millions more to unhealthy smog on the edges of the fire zones and in the big cities. Indonesia has publicly asked Singapore to lend its environment officials a pollution index monitor.

"We would like to know what the pollution index is in Rengat and other towns, but I am not sure if the level can be indicated on the instruments because it is unimaginably high," Sarwono said.

The Indonesian forest fires are the disastrous product of unusual weather conditions and years of land-clearing and logging in tropical forests that once acted as storehouses of wet season rains.

Fires in Indonesia are seasonal and are routinely used as a cheap and quick method of land-clearing during the dry months. Over the past 15 years, land-clearing for plantations and new settlements has been accelerated, with 300,000 hectares tagged for clearing this dry season alone. The legendary jungles of the island of Borneo (Indonesian Kalimantan) have been reduced to a patchwork quilt of plantations, damaged forest and eroded, denuded land left behind by thoughtless clear-felling.

This year a strong El Nino pattern has taken hold over Indonesia, so the monsoon rains due this month have not arrived to douse the flames. Climate experts have predicted that soaking rainfall will not begin until November or December. Many of the land-clearing fires are now burning out of control.

Right across Indonesia, tens of millions of people have also been hit by drought as wells dry up and rice and other crop planting is delayed under hot, hazy skies. The impact of the drought on the condition of Indonesia's remaining forests, too, is frightening.

A report on "Regional Haze" submitted to the Environment Minister from the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Jakarta this week said the tropical forests were now dry enough to burn for the first time since 1982, a year of massive fires during a strong El Nino pattern.

"As this dry season extends further and becomes more intense, the risk increases of fires on a scale similar to 1982-83," the report said, citing the destruction of 3.6 million hectares of forest in Kalimantan alone.

The immediate challenge facing Indonesia is to put out the fires and deal with the impact on the health of at least 20 million people living under the smoke. Authorities said this week that millions had suffered throat inflammations and diarrhoea linked to smoke inhalation and poor health was affecting productivity nationwide. Crop failures and rice shortfalls are likely next season because of the delay in planting crops. But, in the long term, Indonesia is facing the crucial issue of land use.

In a landmark statement this week, Sarwono said Indonesia must revise its laws and land-use patterns. For years the Government has dismissed seasonal fires as the work of shifting cultivators, the small groups of powerless indigenous people who live in the diminishing forests of Kalimantan and Sumatra. Now, for the first time, Jakarta has officially acknowledged that it is the big logging and plantation companies, many with links to senior officials, who are responsible for deliberately lighting the fires to clear their land.

Sarwono says more than 175 companies are under investigation.

"When we knock on their doors they say they don't know anything about the fires and that they have friends in high places," the Environment Minister said. "But when we show them satellite photos of their land burning they are less able to deny the charges."

Some of Indonesia's biggest timber and plantations companies have been given 15 days to prove they are not responsible for the fires or face a huge compensation bill: a bill for cloud-seeding to attempt to put out the fires, a bill for medical treatment for local people and a bill for the time environment officials have spent investigating.

The question now is whether the political will exists in Indonesia to push the case against the loggers as well as review land-use policies that have permitted the clearing of large tracts of forest every year.

According to the ASEAN report the area affected by land-clearing fires is steadily increasing. "At the simplest level, moist evergreen forests are not well adapted to fire. High heat can kill trees; it removes the shade required for regeneration and can eliminate seed sources. In disturbed [damaged forest] areas, repeated burning promotes... soil nutrient depletions and erosion."

The report said more than one-third of Indonesia's land area had been affected by fire, indicating that the topography of the world's second-largest tropical rainforest belt was being drastically altered by land clearing.

"There should be a serious review of the use of forests in Indonesia. There is no doubt that environmental considerations must be factored into planning in the future," Sarwono said.

In 1966, 82 per cent of Indonesia's land mass was covered by primary forest. By 1982, it was 68 per cent, and recent satellite photos indicate the area of forest cover is about 55 per cent, including timber estates. About 64 million hectares, roughly a third of Indonesia's land mass, is now covered by commercial logging concessions.

Last year Indonesia became the world's biggest plywood exporter, according to official statistics, and more than 30 per cent of all concessions are controlled by 10 companies with close links to the Soeharto Government.

The even bigger picture of what such disasters are doing to the earth is more complicated.

Indonesia's drought is a consequence of climate change, caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

"We are facing major changes. This is a real-time experience; it is no longer theory," Sarwono told his ASEAN counterparts. "Indonesia is living climate change."

That fact, he argued, was an issue for developed nations.

"Greenhouse gases have been accumulating for more than a century due to industrialisation. There is a difference in how a developed country and a developing country pollutes."

Developed countries, he said, had created "insidious, unseen, global pollution" that could only be measured by scientists familiar with ozone depletion and global warming. Developing countries, he said, citing the smoke and polluted river systems, polluted in a very "visible" way.

Newly industrialising nation, such as Indonesia, however, were not responsible for the long-term gases creating climate change. Japan and other developed countries, ASEAN argued, must set targets for the reduction of greenhouse gases at the Convention of Climate Change later this year.

In the meantime, Indonesian officials said they would have to face their disaster and were putting into place evacuation plans and provisions for the widespread distribution of drinking water if the rains are further delayed.

"What can we do?" asked one overwhelmed official: "We can't tell the people not to breathe."

Country