Tb. Arie Rukmantara, Jakarta – Rivers awash in chemical pollutants and untreated sewage, denuded forests and smog-choked cities are putting the Indonesian public at risk in an increasingly toxic environment, a new government report says.
The 295-page State of the Environment Report 2005, released Tuesday by the Office of the State Minister for the Environment, listed 65 environmental watershed areas in critical condition – up from only 22 in 1992 – amid the sustained exploitation of the environment.
"The country's environmental degradation is getting worse. This clearly explains the cause of the series of disasters that all of us have faced," said State Minister for the Environment Rachmat Witoelar in a speech at the report's launching.
The report, published annually since 2001, evaluates the quality of the country's air, atmosphere, water, coastal and marine, biodiversity, waste, hazardous compounds and toxic waste, as well as providing analysis of the overall environmental situation and its impact on public health.
Deforestation is exacting a particularly high toll, the report noted, with over 31,000 hectares of protected forests set to be turned into mining areas after six of 13 mining companies with presidential permits filed requests to exploit minerals in the conservation areas.
Such forest conversion practices along with rampant illegal logging increased the deforestation rate to 3.5 million hectares in 2005.
Rachmat reiterated the government had done its utmost to curb environmental degradation by establishing numerous programs to promote public awareness and set strict environmental standards for businesses, but said the report should be used to formulate proper prevention and mitigation measures to face disasters.
"Most importantly, (it is) to prevent more life and material casualties should other disasters occur," he said.
Despite his pledges, the report also underlined that the government has been unable to fully enforce the tenets of the 1997 Environmental Law. In the report's sub-chapter on environmental law enforcement, the report said Rachmat's office received 152 reports of environmental violations last year, but only 34 were verified and processed.
Nearly all have received minor sanctions: 16 were given technical supervision of their activities, there were eight out-of-court settlements, six are under investigation and only four were accorded administrative sanctions. None ended with criminal punishment, which is clearly stipulated in the environmental law.
The state ministry's deputy assistant for environmental law enforcement, Hoetomo, argued that the number simply represented the number of institutions that had been prosecuted, but did not reflect their "deterrent effects".
The 10-chapter report also reveals huge threats to the public from environmental degradation, with 30 rivers across the country highly contaminated with chemical pollutants and bacterial agents, such as human waste.
Air quality in major cities also decreased, with only 29 clean-air days in Jakarta last year, 21 in Surabaya and 24 in Medan.
Another of Rachmat's deputies, Isa Karmisa Adiputra, who was in charge of compiling the report, said outbreaks of infection diseases – ranging from diarrhea to dengue fever and bird flu – were due to poor public awareness of spatial planning in the environment.
"In the bird flu case, our office actually formulated a decade ago that poultry farming, including backyard farming, should be set several hundred meters from residential areas," said the deputy for capacity enhancement.
"Since this formulation is ignored both by the regional administration and by the public, now we have to face a major outbreak of deadly infectious diseases." Among the few bright aspects of the report was the discovery of dozens of new species of animals and plants in an unexplored corner of Papua.