What do the climate and orangutans have in common? They are both threatened by coal – the first by burning it, and the second by mining it.
At the recent United Nations Climate Summit in New York, world leaders and multinational corporations pledged a variety of actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation to avert a looming disaster caused by global warming.
Indonesia, home to most of the world’s orangutans, is a major player in both emissions and deforestation, with the third largest tropical forest area in the world, after the Amazon and the Congo Basin. In 2012, Indonesia surpassed Brazil as the country with the highest annual rate of primary forest loss. The country is also ranked the fourth top emitter of greenhouse gases in the world (after China, the U.S., and the European Union) during some years, largely due to high deforestation rates and peatland fires.
The New York Declaration on Forests, announced at the UN Climate Summit, called on partners to work to at least halve the rate of natural forest loss globally by 2020 and strive to end natural forest loss by 2030. It also targeted achieving a reduction in deforestation-related emissions by 4.5-8.8 billion tons per year by 2030.
The now-former Indonesia president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, announced in 2009 a voluntary commitment to reduce the country’s carbon footprint by 26 percent.In May 2011 the commitment was put into action with the issuance of the Presidential Instruction No. 10 that called for a moratorium on granting new licenses for forest clearance. This moratorium, which many have criticized as not going far enough, is in force until May 2015.
Coal boom
However, Indonesia’s greenhouse gas emissions don’t just come from deforestation, but also, indirectly, from its role as a major coal exporter. Burning coal is the largest single source of carbon emissions worldwide and Indonesia is supplying this industry. In fact, Indonesia’s coal exports have increased more than 500 percent over the last decade, from 60 million tons in 2000 to 304 million tons in 2012. This makes Indonesia the world’s biggest exporter of thermal coal.
It gets worse. The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) predicts that Indonesia’s coal production will continue to increase 4.8 percent annually through 2020, when it will reach 450 million tons. The majority of the production will not be burned at home, but will continue to be exported. By 2035, the IEA estimates Indonesia will produce 550 million tons of coal. Even two decades from now Indonesia is projected to remain the world’s leading thermal coal producer and exporter.
This means that even if Indonesia manages to curb its own greenhouse gas emissions, it will continue to export them in the form of coal and suffer the consequences of global warming as if it had burned the coal itself.
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