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By Samantha Brown
JAKARTA: In a darkened auditorium
on a weekday afternoon, Indonesians are warned that floods in their
capital will become more catastrophic and the haze-inducing fires
blazing through their forests are partly to blame. A message from Al
Gore has arrived.
For the first time in Indonesia,
the world’s fourth most populous nation and its third-largest
carbon emitter, a tailored version of the climate change slideshow
delivered by former US vice-president Gore and featured in the smash
movie An Inconvenient Truth is under way.
Emerald Starr, an American
environmental engineer based in Bali, was one of 200 people trained
directly by Gore last year to spread his environmental message
around the world.
While Starr has presented the
results of his weeklong training several times on the resort island,
this is the first show to include detailed Indonesian data provided
by environmental group WWF, so the impact is strong.
Graphs with soaring and plunging
lines are interspersed with startling images of devastation:
drought-scarred landscapes in Australia, the wreckage of a typhoon
in the Philippines, flood victims in India.
The several-hundred strong
audience gasps at photographs of polar bears and penguins perched on
melting chunks of ice, as statistic after statistic shows that
humans must take responsibility—immediately—for climate change.
Some 60,000 species have
disappeared in the past 100 years; 30 new diseases have emerged
since 1976. And if current trends continue, a map of Indonesia
bleeding blue shows what will happen as a result of rising sea
levels by 2070.
“Two islands off Madura [an
island off the north coast of Java] are gone and Jakarta—you can
imagine the devastation,” Starr says.
Indonesia’s main contribution
to global warming is through the burning of its forests. Companies
typically have concessions of 200,000 hectares [494,000
acres]—three times the size of Jakarta—and some as many as a
million, or twice the size of Bali, Starr says.
While the wood is used for pulp,
palm oil plantations soon follow, though the companies are supposed
to replace the trees with acacia.
“Actually Indonesia has very
good environmental policies, but they need to be enforced,” Starr
explains.
The audience is receptive, but
they want to know whether the talk will be repeated elsewhere in
Indonesian, rather than English.
“Somebody in the audience is
training tonight and if anyone here tonight is interested in that
please come and see me,” replies Starr, who may deliver his
presentation to a UN conference on climate change on Bali in
December.
They are also thirsty for more
knowledge on what they can do practically. Starr tells them to
recycle; to carpool; to change their light bulbs.
“Never underestimate the power
of individual citizens taking steps individually,” says Starr, who
is not paid for his time here. “Everything you do matters. Nothing
is frivolous at this point.”
‘All of us have a mission’
Arif Hasyim, a 35-year-old
director of a biogas company, is taken aback by the Indonesian data
and tells AFP that people must get organized.
“I myself was quite shocked
with what’s happening in Indonesia. It actually had more of an
effect on us, because when you’re talking about climate change,
[you think of it] happening somewhere else, but not to us,” Hasyim
says.
“But what about the follow up?
What do we have to do? All of us have a mission to gather people
together again to move on, from just getting information to the
action.”
Eric Natanael, a 33-year-old
environmental engineer, says the show was “like half of a complete
presentation. The other half is what you can do, really, in real
terms.”
Hundreds of businesspeople are
expected to attend Starr’s evening session, but some are here now,
including Suzy Hutomo, the CEO of the Body Shop Indonesia.
“I see now that the impact for
Indonesia is very real,” she says.
“The Body Shop has been
‘green’ but personally now I intend to spread the message to
people I know, to my customers.”
--AFP
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