Holiday Plan and Climate Change

As the global community deliberates at the 16th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Cancun, Mexico, countries from Southeast Asia are faced with the task of ensuring that regional concerns are addressed in discussions of the impact of climate change on human health.

Climate change strikes at the basic pillars of life: water, food, air and the ecosystem. Island nations like Maldives, mountainous countries like Bhutan and Nepal, and countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand with large populations living along the coast are most vulnerable. More frequent extreme weather events is one of the expected manifestation of climate change.

The region has in the last few years experienced cyclones, floods and heat waves that have killed thousands and left millions more homeless.

In addition, climate change is expected to increase the burden of malnutrition, diarrhea, malaria and dengue, all of which are climate-sensitive. Such effects are likely to overwhelm the already overburdened health infrastructure in the region.

The UNFCCC recognized the adverse impact of climate change on human health in 1992. It urged parties to formulate policies and actions to minimize the adverse effects on economy, public health and the quality of the environment.

Yet 17 years later, only one of the 47 nations mentioned human health as a consideration in the preparatory submissions to the UNFCCC negotiations for the Copenhagen meeting in December 2009.

This silence about health indicates a serious blind spot. Human health seems to be lost in the debate on climate change science, emissions targets and trading, differential responsibilities and threats to livelihoods and shelter.

The evidence is clear: Climate change will directly impact human health. It is time to act now.

Resources need to be channeled to support adaptation measures by the health and environment sectors.

The global community needs to support efforts, technically and financially, to protect health from climate change in this region. Health research to estimate the economic impact of climate sensitive diseases on developing countries needs to be prioritized.

Countries from Southeast Asia have demonstrated political will at the highest level.

This is evident in the New Delhi Declaration by the Health Ministers from 11 countries of the region in 2008, which was reiterated more recently by a conference of regional members of parliaments at Thimphu, Bhutan and in the Dhaka declaration by ministers and senior officers from ministries of health and environment.

But the health effects of climate change — and the damage — are already upon us. It is time for the countries that are most vulnerable to climate change to voice their concerns and ensure that human health becomes the central theme for climate change discussions and agreements.

Hot News Indonesian Natural Resourse

Conserving Indonesian natural capital

 

In the second half of 2010 we experienced a series of natural disasters within a short period of time, such as flooding in Papua, an earthquake and tsunami in West Sumatra and volcanic eruption in Central Java that claimed many lives.
By now we must be aware that we, humans, are part of nature and consequently, our life is absolutely dependent on natural conditions. Despite experiencing natural disasters, in general, we are fortunate to be blessed with rich natural resources.
Our terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems with their biological and geological resources constitute our natural capital upon which our success and even survival as a nation depend. Our natural capital provides ecosystem services essential to our well being.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005), written by many experts from reputed international institutions such as FAO, UNEP, World Bank, UN University and many universities, classifies ecosystem services into four categories, namely provisioning services (producing food, fiber, fuel, water, etc.), regulating services (regulating climate, air quality, water purification, pollination, etc.) cultural services (providing spiritual, educational, aesthetical values, etc.) and supporting services (soil formation, photosynthesis, water cycling and nutrient cycling).
All services are important and interrelated. For example, the presence of pollinators (regulating service) and soil nutrient (supporting service) are important for the maintenance of food crop productivity (provisioning service).
However, most resource management decisions are determined mostly by provisioning services because they yield marketable goods. Other services usually are not traded on the market and therefore have no price or are at least undervalued.
Fortunately, our government legally recognizes the many services of the ecosystems. We have designated some of our terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems as conservation areas.
Law No. 41/1999 on forestry explicitly defines a forest as an ecosystem. Realizing that a forest ecosystem has many functions, we have designated more than 30 percent of our forests as conservation forests and protected forests. No logging is allowed in these two forest categories.
In practice, however, we perceive forests mainly as timber producers and seas as fish producers. As a
result, our forests and seas have been exploited excessively, legally and illegally, which jeopardizes their sustainability.
Our market-driven economic system fails to value other ecosystem services. In developed countries and in Java, the cultural services in the form of recreation and tourism have resulted in monetary value, but in many areas in Indonesia, most cultural values have not yielded money.
To some degree, the regulating services are beginning to get a global market value through carbon trading. But the implementation of carbon trading may take a long time and its beneficial impact to a local community remains to be seen.
Attempts have been made to make an economic valuation of ecosystem services. Costanza et al in 1987 published an article in the British journal Nature stating that the estimated economic value of the world’s ecosystem services was in the range of US$16 trillion to $54 trillion annually, with an average of $33 trillion per annum.
Because of the nature of the uncertainties, this must be considered a minimum estimate. Global GNP at that time was around $18 trillion per year. Most of those values, however, are not economically measured because they have no price.
At the national level, economic valuation of conservation areas has been done. For example, the total economic value of Leuser National Park over the period of 2000-2030, with a 4 percent discount rate, is: $7.0 billion under the “deforestation scenario”, $9.5 billion under the “conservation scenario” and $9.1 billion under the “selective utilization scenario” (Vanbeukering et al., 2003).
Although the conservation scenario has the highest value and benefits all stakeholders, the park is still under serious threat of illegal logging and encroachment, because the economic value in the conservation scenario is not in the form of cash money but mostly in the form of water supply, flood prevention and supporting services for agriculture. Those values are not direct, while cutting timber or converting the forest into plantations will yield cash.
The failure of our market-driven economic system to value non-marketable ecosystem services has caused degradation of our natural capital, which may jeopardize the flow of ecosystem services.
At the global level, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 60 percent of the ecosystem services are being degraded or used unsustainably.
If the trend continues, the degradation of ecosystem services may grow significantly worse and prevent the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.
Former World Bank economist Herman Daly believes that at present, economic development is not limited by lack of human-made capital, but of natural capital (Hawken et al., 2010).
To achieve sustainable development, it is imperative that we conserve our natural capital in order to maintain the flow of ecosystem services. Several measures must be taken.
To prevent excessive use of natural resources we can increase tax on the exploitation of natural resources and reduce subsidies, giving a signal to the market that our natural resources are getting scarcer. On the other hand, we must give incentives for the development of technologies and management practices to use resources more efficiently and to reduce pollution.
But most important is to educate businesspeople and policymakers of the intangible benefits of ecosystem services. Although at present they have little economic value, in fact their total value is infinite. For without the continuing flow of ecosystem services, our economies will come to a halt.
Conserving our natural capital is essential for the sustainability of economic development to ensure the well-being of our growing population

ABOUT INDONESIA ARCHIPELAGO

ndonesia is naturally blessed. The country sits on some of the most valuable, most extensive ecological real estate in the world: rainforest, mangrove swamp, coral reefs and temperate woodland all abound across the archipelago.

Until recently, this ecological wealth wouldn't have mattered all that much, at least in monetary terms. After all, no one actually pays for this natural endowment.

Until now, that is. ""Payment for environmental services"", often abbreviated to PES, is now hitting the economic mainstream -- and Indonesia could be in for some windfall profits.

There is no better illustration of Indonesia's natural good fortune than the Leuser ecosystem in northern Sumatra. Leuser is one of the ecologically richest places on earth. It contains over twenty-five thousand known species, including 4 percent of the worlds birds and 3 percent of its mammals.

Economists estimate that Leuser generates some US$22 billion of benefits annually for Indonesia. These include the beneficial effect forest cover has on flood prevention, as well as soil conservation for farmers and the supply of uncontaminated river water to downstream fishing, dams and agriculture.

Of course, this $22 billion figure is a notional value. The benefits are real enough, but no money actually changes hands. No one pays local communities for protecting the trees that prevent flooding. Downstream water users don't pay upstream users for keeping the water coming.

But that's beginning to change, thanks to a new approach to protecting the environment: Payment for Environmental Services.

The idea behind PES is simple. Ecosystems provide a wide variety of useful goods and services that enhance human welfare. Some of these goods and services are well known and already play a significant part in the market economy: obvious examples include crops, livestock, clothing and construction materials.

So, goes the PES reasoning, why not pay for all the other services ecosystems provide -- the regulation of rainwater run-off, soil formation, nutrient cycling, the maintenance of biodiversity, climate stabilization and so on. After all, they're no less important than clothes or construction materials, and, in many cases, are a whole lot more so.

The Costa Rican town of Heredia, for example, has established an ""environmentally-adjusted water charge"" to compensate communities living upstream for not engaging in agricultural practices -- such as chopping down trees -- that would jeopardize the town's water supply. New York City has engaged in a similar deal with residents of the upstream Catskill Mountains, reasoning that it's cheaper to pay them than to build a new filtration plant.

Or consider biodiversity. The European Union spent $12 billion in the second half of the 1990s to divert 20 million hectares of farmland into long-term set-aside for conservation purposes. The United States government annually spends $1.5 billion to remove 12-15 million hectares from intensive agriculture, an area twice the size of all national and state wildlife parks combined in the lower 48 states.

The international community is slowly recognizing that life on Earth is more precarious than previously imagined. Global warming threatens to change weather patterns, raise sea levels and undermine economies. Loss of biodiversity is a once-and-for-all loss to all of humanity, and might take with it untold medical and scientific possibilities, such as the fabled cure for cancer.

So attention is turning to an obvious solution: Why not simply pay Indonesian communities not to chop down forests, or pollute rivers, or burn grasslands? Even better, why not pay them to plant more trees and restore degraded ecosystems?

The fullest embodiment of this approach comes courtesy of the Kyoto Protocol, designed to combat global warming. Under Kyoto, governments and private firms in the developed world are positively encouraged to invest in forestation projects in the developing world. They are then able to claim ""offset credits"" for the additional carbon dioxide that the forests absorb.

Five million hectares of such ""offset plantations"" have now been established, and the figure is growing daily. The International Automobile Association, for instance, is planting 30,000 trees in Mexico to partly offset the 5,500 tons of carbon emitted annually by Formula One car racing. The Tokyo Electric Power Company is planting 3,000 hectares of eucalyptus forest in Tasmania in order to yield 130,000 tons of carbon credits. The Dutch government is investing heavily in a 20,000 hectare poplar plantation in Romania.

The Costa Rican government has developed an elaborate, nationwide PES program to protect biodiversity -- and has received over $40 million from the World Bank and the UN's Global Environment Facility to do so. As the Leuser ecosystem ably demonstrates, Indonesia is not short of ecological assets worth preserving either.

Indonesia is already making big strides in deriving payments from more traditional environmental sources -- promoting wildlife eco-tourism, for example. But it now has the opportunity to tap into a huge reservoir of new funding by doing little more than conserving its unique natural heritage.