Jakarta - Indonesia will lodge a formal protest against Yale
University for its environmental performance index (EPI) report,
which ranked Indonesia one of the world's least environmentally
friendly countries, a local news report said Monday.
The Jakarta Post reported that Amanda Katili, the State Ministry
for the Environment's special expert on climate change, was scheduled
to fly to the United States Monday to present the newest forestry
data in an attempt to refute the EPI report.
State Minister of the Environment Rachmat Witoelar was quoted as
saying the report was unfair. 'It is absurd because all the data is
invalid,' he said.
The EPI report, published in the US magazine Newsweek's July 7-14
edition, ranked Indonesia 102nd out of 149 countries in environmental
matters.
'Where the two biggest carbon emitters, China and the United
States, have coal plants and cars to blame, the number 3 culprit -
Indonesia - produces 85 per cent of its carbon emissions from
forest,' the report in Newsweek said.
The report said that forests were almost wiped out on heavily
populated Java island, while Sumatra lost 35 per cent of its forest
and Kalimantan lost 19 per cent in the 1990s. Deforestation is also
threatening the Sumatran rhinoceros and the orang-utan with
extinction.
'In the forestry component of Yale and Columbia's Environmental
Performance Index, Indonesia comes in last with a score of zero,' it
said.
Katili as quoted by the Post as saying she would present Yale
researchers with the new forestry data available at the Forestry
Ministry Website and the Food and Agriculture Organization website.
'It is the researchers' own fault if they don't understand
Indonesian language. They could have contacted us for the latest data
before publishing the EPI ranking,' she said.
Indonesia has 120 million hectares of rain forest. The Post
reported the deforestation rate between 1987 and 1997 was 1.8 million
hectares annually. Forest fires between the year 1998 and 2000 raised
the rate to 2.8 million hectares per year, before falling back to 1.8
million hectares per year between 2000 and 2006, according to
government figures.
USA
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