Blog: Despite Trump, Indonesia Should Prioritize Climate and Nature
By: Amanda Hurowitz, Forest Commodities Lead, Mighty Earth
This week, President Prabowo Subianto of Indonesia is visiting the United States for a meeting of President Trump’s Board of Peace and to conclude a bilateral trade agreement. The Indonesian leader and U.S. president have a warm relationship, but one place they differ is their approach to climate and nature.
The Trump administration is seeking to end all government efforts to fight climate change, targeting clean energy projects for termination and, most recently, rolling back the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. In contrast, President Prabowo told the World Economic Forum earlier this year that Indonesia wants “to be a good neighbor, a good responsible citizen of the world, protecting the environment, protecting nature. We must not destroy nature, we must live with nature.” He should know that many here in the U.S. support this vision.
As President Prabowo works alongside President Trump, we hope he will continue to protect nature and climate. Indonesia has made tremendous strides and can ill afford to backslide now. In the months ahead, President Prabowo has the opportunity to build on Indonesia’s recent progress by restoring nature in Sumatra and rechanneling his administration’s Food Estates projects.
For years, Indonesia’s forests were chopped down to make way for palm oil plantations. Peat swamps were drained and then, each year, they caught fire. The resulting emissions were catastrophic, pushing Indonesia to the fourth-largest climate emitter in 2015. The fires were so bad that year that on some days they generated more daily emissions than the entire U.S. economy. But that trend began to change in 2016, as private sector commitments – paired with complementary government policies – led to dramatic declines in deforestation.
Then late last year, Indonesia suffered the devastating effects of a rare tropical cyclone that hit the island of Sumatra and killed more than 1,100 people. Nearly 16 inches of rainfall caused rivers to burst their banks, leading to landslides and mudslides – both made more deadly by deforestation. The photos are like nothing we’ve ever seen, with whole communities buried in logs. And for the Tapanuli orangutan, the world’s most endangered great ape, the effects are equally extreme. Numbering fewer than 800, scientists estimate as much as 10% of the remaining population could have been wiped out by the floods – pushing the species even closer to extinction.
As Indonesia recovers, the country could institute a program of ecosystem conservation and restoration in this devastated region – one that will help prevent future disasters while protecting the people and wildlife of Sumatra.
Similarly, the government’s massive bioenergy agricultural expansion projects should focus on Indonesia’s 8 million+ acres of degraded lands instead of bulldozing intact ecosystems. As currently envisioned, these food and energy estates are being called the largest deforestation project in the world. An estimated 43,800 hectares have already been cleared on the remote island of Papua, the vast majority of it in Indigenous territory. Expanding on degraded lands instead is a proven model: in the past five years, palm oil, paper, and the rubber industries have succeeded in growing without deforestation; the same approach can work for sugar rice and other crops.
Many Americans still care deeply about stopping climate change, protecting forests, and saving endangered species. We must look to world leaders to step up. With these steps, Indonesia can protect its forests and don the mantle of climate and nature leadership that President Prabowo seems eager to take up – and that the United States has so shamefully abandoned.
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