Regional Round Table Meeting and Consultation “Enhancing Regional Cooperation in Fire Management in Southeast Asia” Ministry…
Year: 2018
BMKG satellites detect 78 hotspots across Sumatera
BMKG satellites detect 78 hotspots across Sumatera
The Jakarta Post
Jakarta | Thu, June 7, 2018, 05:28 pm
The Terra and Aqua satellites have detected 78 hotspots across Sumatra, indicating the possible occurrence of forest fires.
Sukisno, head of the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) in Pekanbaru, Riau, said the satellites detected the most recent hot spot at 6 a.m. local time on Thursday.
Based on the satellites’ images, the hot spots are spread out across Sumatra. Most were detected in Riau, with 23 hot spots, followed by Bengkulu ( 18 ), Aceh ( 10 ), Jambi (four) and West Sumatra (two). Four were detected in Jambi and one Bangka Belitung and the Riau Islands.
“The weather in Riau is cloudy with a possibility of mild rain,” Sukisno said as quoted by tempo.co on Thursday.
The Riau administration previously declared an emergency for forest fires to prevent further flare-ups from affecting the upcoming 2018 Asian Games in Palembang, South Sumatra.
Riau Disaster Mitigation Agency (BPBD) head Edward Sanger said the emergency status would end on Nov.30.
“The President has instructed the National Disaster Mitigation Agency to prevent any haze disasters caused by forest fires during the Asian Games,” he said. (dpk/ebf)
Regional Fire Management Resource Center South East Asia (RFMRC-SEA) Meeting, Bogor, 7 June 2018
By: Bambang Hero Saharjo
The second-day activities of Round Table Meeting and Consultation “Enhancing Regional Cooperation on Fire Management in South East Asia”, is visiting The Regional Fire Management Resource Center South East Asia (RFMRC-SEA) located at the Faculty of Forestry, Campus IPB, Drmaga, Bogor on June 7st. 2018.
ASEAN ministers vow to fight transboundary haze
ASEAN ministers vow to fight transboundary haze
By: James Kon
ASEAN member countries of Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand have pledged to remain vigilant and step up preventive efforts to minimise any possible occurrence of transboundary smoke haze during periods of dry weather.
In a joint statement issued after the 20th Meeting of the Sub-Regional Ministerial Steering Committee on Transboundary Haze Pollution (20th MSC) held on June 1 in Bangkok, ASEAN ministers underscored the importance of combating transboundary haze.
The meeting was attended by ministers/representatives responsible for the environment, for land, forest fires and haze from Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand as well as the Secretary-General of ASEAN Dato Paduka Lim Jock Hoi.
The 20th Meeting of the Technical Working Group on Transboundary Haze Pollution (20th TWG) preceded the MSC.
Brunei Darussalam was represented by Minister of Development Dato Seri Paduka Awang Haji Suhaimi bin Haji Gafar along with Acting Permanent Secretary (Administration and Finance) at the Ministry of Development Dr Nor Imtihan binti Haji Abdul Razak and officials from the Department of Environment, Parks and Recreation.
The ministers noted the ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centre’s (ASMC’s) weather outlook that the dry season in the southern ASEAN region was expected between June and October 2018 during which neither El-Niño nor La-Niña condition was forecast. During the season, occasional dry periods could result in an increase in the risk of hotspot activities in the region.
The ministers noted ASMC’s continual efforts in improving its monitoring and early warning of transboundary haze and appreciated its new five-year Regional Capability Building Programme that will benefit the ASEAN member states through the sharing of technical knowledge and skills in haze monitoring and weather and climate prediction.
In the joint statement, the ministers also noted with appreciation various initiatives and actions by MSC countries to address the transboundary haze pollution in the region. The MSC countries reaffirmed their readiness to provide assistance such as deployment of technical resources for firefighting assistance on emergency response situation, if requested, and to collaborate among MSC countries with enhanced cooperation and coordination to mitigate land and forest fires, when necessary.
The ministers recalled the commitment and guidance of the ASEAN leaders at the 31st ASEAN Summit held on November 13, 2017 in Manila and the 32nd ASEAN Summit held on April 28, 2018 in Singapore, towards regional cooperation on transboundary haze pollution control.
The ministers also reiterated their commitment to fully and effectively implement the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution (AATHP) and the Roadmap on ASEAN Cooperation towards Transboundary Haze Pollution Control (THPC) with Means of Implementation (the roadmap) to achieve a haze-free ASEAN by 2020.
They welcomed the progress towards the finalisation and operationalisation of the Establishment Agreement and Host Country Agreement of the ASEAN Coordinating Centre (ACC) for THPC in Indonesia.
The ministers also welcomed the progress on the implementation of the roadmap and looked forward to the mid-term review of its effectiveness as well as to sustain momentum in ensuring demonstrable improvements so as to achieve the vision of creating a haze-free ASEAN by 2020.
The ministers noted the discussion and substantial progress on the implementation of the strategic review of the Sub-Regional Ministerial Steering Committee programmes and activities which include enhancing haze control management through early warning/monitoring and fire prevention and suppression, refinement of the Fire Danger Rating System (FDRS), revised Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for monitoring, assessment and joint emergency response under the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution.
The statement recalled that the ministers at the 13th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution (COP-13) held on September 12-13, 2017 in Brunei Darussalam had welcomed the endorsement of the modality for sharing hotspot information among MSC countries as recommended by the Seventh Meeting of the MSC Technical Task Force (7th MTTF). The ministers noted that the information sharing mechanism has been operationalised during the dry season in southern ASEAN.
The ministers noted the significant progress of the implementation of the ASEAN Peatland Management Strategy (APMS 2006-2020) through the ASEAN Programme on Sustainable Management of Peatland Ecosystems (APSMPE 2014-2020) and expressed appreciation for the support from ASEAN dialogue and development partners.
The ministers recalled the Financing Agreement for the ASEAN-EU Programme on Sustainable Use of Peatland and Haze Mitigation in ASEAN (SUPA) which was signed on December 27, 2016 with an indicative budget of EUR24.5 million for the duration of 60 months and looked forward to the programme implementation in 2018.
They also looked forward to the finalisation and signing of Large Grant Agreement of the Measurable Action for Haze-Free Sustainable Land Management in Southeast Asia (MAHFSA), a programme supported by International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), amounting USD3.5 million for duration of 60 months.
The ministers reaffirmed their commitment to coordinate the implementation of programmes/projects under APSMPE (2014-2020) through ASEAN mechanisms, enhanced national level efforts and multi-stakeholder partnership. They also supported the second review of APMS to be undertaken by the ASEAN Task Force on Peatlands.
The ministers expressed their appreciation to the Royal Thai Government for hosting the 20th MSC Meeting, the excellent arrangements made and the generous hospitality provided.
The 21st MSC Meeting will be held in Brunei Darussalam in 2019.
Source Link: https://borneobulletin.com.bn/asean-ministers-vow-to-fight-transboundary-haze/
Benedictine monks see red over Vietnam forest fires
Benedictine monks see red over Vietnam forest fires
Brothers claim blazes were started deliberately and ask authorities and individuals to respect their dignity
ucanews.com reporter, Hue City
Vietnam, May 29, 2018
Benedictine monks in a central Vietnam province have criticized authorities for ignoring forest fires that they claim were started deliberately.
Brother Stanislas Tran Minh Vong said two fires were found in pine forest around the Benedictine Monastery of Thien An just outside the ancient city of Hue in Thua Thien Hue province on the afternoons of May 22 and 23.
Brother Vong, 81, said 50 monks used water pipes, hoes, shovels, knives and other tools to extinguish the first fire, which broke out about 300 meters from the monastery.
“A group of gangsters shouted at us and tried to prevent us from extinguishing the fire, which was approaching the monastery,” he said. They also told the monks that the forest does not belong to the monastery.
Two security officers from Thuy Bang commune saw the incident but did nothing to stop the flames. “They tried to take away cameras from some monks who were videoing the fire to find its cause,” said Brother Vong.
Brother Vong said the second fire was put out by Benedictines and some soldiers.
Father Louis Gonzaga Dang Hung Tan, head of the monastery, said four fires have started in the area this year. They destroyed five hectares of pine forest planted by the monks decades ago.
“After examining the scene, we confirm that these fires were caused by people. All fires aimed to cause disorder to the monks’ life and religious activities,” Father Tan said.
The priest said some groups of strangers have broken into the monastery and watched the monks’ work for recent months. However, they have never been present at fires and protected the monastery’s properties, he added.
He also accused some individuals and organizations of destroying and confiscating the monks’ land and properties.
The monks have had legal ownership of the monastery and its 107 hectares of pine forest and farmland since 1940.
Since 1975, local authorities have “borrowed” or confiscated land and assigned it to state-run forestry and tourism companies. The monks were allowed to retain only six hectares of land including the monastery.
The monks say they have never transferred the ownership of properties or land to any individual or organization.
“We ask relevant individuals and organizations to respect our dignity and basic human rights by laws,” Father Tan said.
He demanded they stop starting forest fires and preserve the pine forest and the monks’ spiritual values, which help create a clean environment.
The area is now in the dry season lasting from May to September. Five rainwater containers at the monastery are running out and pools used to water orange farms have dried up. Monks have to carry water 10 kilometers to use for their daily activities.
“It is unfair that we are not allowed to use our 49-hectare lake near the monastery,” said Father Tan, referring to a lake confiscated by the government.
Source Link: https://www.ucanews.com/news/benedictine-monks-see-red-over-vietnam-forest-fires/82435
Fighting fires on Indonesia’s peatlands
Fighting fires on Indonesia’s peatlands
22 May 2018
The United Nations has proclaimed May 22 the International Day for Biological Diversity to increase understanding and awareness of biodiversity issues. As one of the world’s most valuable ecosystems, peatlands support diverse species, including orangutans. Yet until recently, peatlands were drained and set ablaze for agriculture, producing an ecological catastrophe that sparked the need for change.
It’s now been three years since massive fires ravaged Indonesia in one of the worst environmental disasters of our century.
The blazes in 2015 scorched 2.6 million hectares across the archipelago, and produced toxic haze that blanketed neighboring countries Singapore and Malaysia. Thousands fell ill, and the Indonesian government suffered $16 billion in economic losses – more than double the sum spent on rebuilding Aceh after the 2004 tsunami, according to the World Bank.
What ignited this catastrophe? More importantly, what is being done to prevent it from reoccurring?
Community champions
Beads of sweat trickled down Udeng’s face as he hauled a heavy hose across the field during a practice drill with his fellow firefighters.
The 45-year-old father of four is from Tumbang Nusa, a village located in Indonesia’s Central Kalimantan Province on Borneo that was an epicenter of the 2015 disaster.
“The fires were very bad,” he said. “I’m here to do my part to make sure they don’t happen again.” At the time, Udeng’s kids fell ill with asthma and his wife evacuated them to a neighboring village for almost a month because their home became inhospitable.
Spurred to action, Udeng joined Indonesia’s network of district-level volunteer firefighting brigades, known as “Masyarakat Peduli Api (MPA)”, which are formed by local village heads. Although Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry established a Forest Fire Brigade at the national level called the “Manggala Agni (MA)”, its capacity is frequently overextended given its vast mandate. This makes the volunteers invaluable. Yet many of them lack proper training and equipment given the informal nature of their units.
To remedy this, in May, intensive training was conducted for 66 volunteer firefighters from six of Central Kalimantan’s most fire-prone villages under the UN Environment project “Generating Anticipatory Measures for Better Utilization of Tropical Peatlands (GAMBUT)”, which is funded by USAID and operated by the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS).
The training was facilitated by highly experienced South African firefighters from the Working on Fire Program who first came to Indonesia in 2015 to assist with the disaster, and have since been collaborating with the UN Environment project as a key partner to increase knowledge exchange and sharing between the two Southern Hemisphere countries.
“Teaching the technical skills is the easy part,” said Trevor Wilson, Executive Director of Working on Fire. “The biggest challenge is changing the way local people think about fire, so the course stresses 80 per cent fire prevention and only 20 per cent fire suppression, because the best fires are the ones that never happen.”
Peat as tinderboxes
For decades, Indonesia’s smallholder farmers have been using fire to clear land for crops to produce commodities like palm oil, of which Indonesia is now the world’s biggest producer. But intentional fires often spiral out of control, particularly during the annual dry season.
Particularly problematic is when these fires ignite on peatland. Peat is comprised of 90 per cent water and 10 per cent organic matter (decaying plants underwater). Peat fires can thus smolder underground for weeks. They are nearly impossible to put out without heavy rains.
“Peatlands need to remain underwater. If you drain them, you are left with a pile of organic materials like leaves and branches, which are extremely flammable,” said Johan Kieft, Lead Technical Advisor for the UN-REDD Programme in Indonesia, an initiative by UN Environment, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) to support developing countries in their efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.
Of the 2.6 million hectares that burned between June-October 2015, 33 per cent occurred on peatlands. When the wildfires broke out, they were exacerbated by an El Niño year that caused an unusually severe dry spell. In normal circumstances, the wildfires would have abated after a few weeks, but in 2015, they raged for months.
Peat and climate change
After the 2015 crisis put a global spotlight on peatlands, Indonesia responded by banning the use of fire in clearing peatlands, establishing a national Peatlands Restoration Agency (BRG), as well as pledging to restore 2 million hectares of peatlands by 2020.
The UN-REDD Programme is working closely with Indonesia to raise awareness about peatlands, given that the country is home to half of the world’s tropical peatlands.
Peat is one of nature’s most effective ways of taking carbon out of the atmosphere and stocking it underground, making it crucial to the fight against climate change. On the flip side, when drained and set ablaze, they can release 10 times more carbon than forest fires.
“By preserving peat, we preserve precious carbon because peat is the largest terrestrial carbon stock in the world,” said Kieft.
For more information contact Leona Liu leona.liu@un.org +66 22882186
Source: https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/fighting-fires-indonesias-peatlands
Singapore set for third straight haze-free year
Singapore set for third straight haze-free year
PUBLISHED MAY 19, 2018, 5:00 AM SGT
Indonesian minister says there won’t be a repeat of 2015 crisis in 2018, thanks to steps taken
Endangered Bornean Orangutans Threatened Further By Wildfires, Both Natural And Human-Made
Endangered Bornean Orangutans Threatened Further By Wildfires, Both Natural And Human-Made
rangutans are among the closest relatives of Homo sapiens, and their three known species are part of the seven great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos and the eastern and western gorillas being the other four — that have survived the onslaught of time and human activity. The latter, particularly land clearing for agriculture and felling trees for logging, are considered as the main factors that have brought orangutans close to the edge of extinction, but a new threat has been brought to light — wildfires.
All three species of orangutans — Bornean, Sumatran and the recently discovered Tapanuli — are found in a small part of Southeast Asia, mostly in Indonesia, and are already listed as critically endangered in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species. Indonesia is also infamous for its annual forest fires, which sometimes blanket the entire region in smoke and haze for months.
Wendy Erb, a researcher from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, was studying male orangutans in Indonesian Borneo when the fires started (often done by small farmers to clear forest land) in 2015. A few weeks later, Erb noticed a change in the male orangutans’ vocalizations, specifically in the call scientists think males use to attract females and to warn other males.
“I thought they sounded raggedy, a little like humans who smoke a lot,” Erb said in a statement Tuesday, and that prompted her to investigate the effects of inhaling smoke on the orangutans’ health.
Cracking a climate conundrum
Cracking a climate conundrum
By Daniel Grossman
Thursday, May 10, 2018
CO2 emissions leveled off between 2014 and 2016. But annual growth of CO2 in the atmosphere rose to more than 50 percent above that of past decades. What explains the contradiction?
In 2015, we earthlings – some 7.5 billion of us – discharged 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air from many tailpipes and smokestacks. That is about the same amount of planet-warming gas belched out in 2014, and the figure remained largely unchanged in 2016.
After a century of exponential growth in the mass of carbon dioxide ejected into the air, the leveling-off of the output caught many observers by surprise. It’s explained partly by widespread substitution of natural gas for coal in electricity production and by expanded use of wind and solar energy.
Although the amount of CO2 ejected into the air leveled off in 2015, the quantity accumulating in the atmosphere did not let up. Rather, it spiked. Indeed, the concentration of the gas increased that year by 3 parts per million (ppm), 50 percent more than in the previous year and the average annual increase of the prior four decades. Researchers hadn’t observed an increase so large since they began systematic measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere back in 1958. The amount of CO2 in the air probably hadn’t surged so much in a single year since at least the end of the last ice age – 10,000 years ago.
The science explaining the seeming dichotomy
A scientific article published in late 2017 explains this apparent paradox. The extra CO2 came from the world’s tropical forests. Beginning at the end of 2014 and lasting 19 months, the strongest El Niño recorded in more than 50 years warmed and dried the tropics – increasing wildfires, slowing tree growth and speeding-up the rotting of dead vegetation – releasing billions of extra tons of CO2 into the air. The authors of that 2017 paper also reported a surprise: Not all tropical forests reacted to the El Niño the same way, a finding the coauthors say could help improve climate models.
The forests most likely rebounded in 2017, and the trend of CO2 growth appears to have returned to its long-term average. But the incident may preview a worrisome mechanism that climate change might permanently trigger, says Junjie Liu, the paper’s lead author and a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Ca. Many climate models project that hot, dry conditions in the tropics, such as those of 2015 and early 2016, will be more common later this century. She says that the results reported in her paper hint that in the future, the tropics “may release more carbon into the atmosphere or absorb less,” speeding the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and further accelerating warming.
Thanks, sea and forests … ‘Nature has done us a fantastic favor.’
For every four tons of CO2 created in the combustion of fossil fuel, only two tons accumulate in the atmosphere. One ton dissolves quickly into sea water and eventually sinks. Forests absorb a second ton, with the trees transforming the gas by photosynthesis into carbon-rich compounds such as sugar and cellulose, some of which becomes permanently sequestered in soil.
“Nature has done us a fantastic favor,” halving the amount of CO2 amassing in the atmosphere, says Scott Denning, of Colorado State University, an atmospheric scientist not involved with the study.
That ocean uptake is likely to continue unhindered in the coming decades, Denning says. The future of forest uptake is less certain. Researchers have tried for years to forecast whether climate change will damage forests and disrupt this critical carbon sequestering process.
Forests in temperate and tropical regions alike take up carbon dioxide and moderate climate change. But many climate scientists say tropical forests – including in the Amazon, the Congo, and Southeast Asia jungles – are the most likely to experience less carbon intake. The consequences, if they do ease off, would be grave. In an average year, primary tropical forests soak up nearly 5 billion tons of CO2, according to figures published in one widely-cited study. Some research suggests that this carbon sink is absorbing less and less, but the evidence is contested. The huge scale and poor infrastructure of tropical forests have bedeviled attempts to determine just how they’re behaving.
The 2017 Science article drew on some of the first measurements from space of atmospheric carbon dioxide. That research almost didn’t happen. On February 24, 2009, NASA launched a Taurus rocket topped by the Orbital Carbon Observatory (OCO), a satellite designed to measure precisely the amount of CO2 above patches of Earth’s surface as small as one-mile square in area. The satellite was to fly over the poles in systematically shifting orbits, passing above the entire planet every 16 days. With a lot of number crunching, researchers had planned to turn the pattern of readings into comprehensive maps of the world’s sources and sinks of the gas.
But the rocket malfunctioned just before nudging the refrigerator-size spacecraft into orbit, and the satellite tumbled into the Indian Ocean. One of the Science paper’s 16 coauthors, David Schimel – a leading expert on the carbon cycle, the circulation of carbon between the atmosphere and reservoirs on Earth – watched NASA’s live feed of the launch in horror.
Schimel had yearned for years for the torrent of data the satellite was to beam down from space. “Just one word” went through his mind when it crashed, he recalls, the ‘Oh sh*t’ cuss that Paul Newman’s and Robert Redford’s characters screamed as they leapt off a cliff in the classic western comedy “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
NASA immediately vowed to build a replacement. Five and a half years later, in mid-2014, the agency successfully launched the satellite’s twin, nicknamed OCO-2. The orbiter has since circled the Earth some 20,000 times, making hundreds of millions of CO2 readings.
After the 2015/2016 El Niño struck, Liu says, she and her collaborators realized that they’d been handed a rare opportunity to observe tropical-forest response to future-like conditions at a spatial scale not previously measurable. They looked at OCO-2 readings and discovered that the El Niño had caused marked changes. In a normal year, CO2 accumulates in tropical trees and soil like water filling a kitchen sink with the tap running. During the El Niño, the sink’s level rose rather than went down, as if a cosmic hand had shut the tap and unplugged the drain. The net result on tropical forests was as if humans beings had increased fossil fuel use by more than 25 percent for a year, releasing an extra 9.5 billion tons CO2 into the atmosphere.
Belt and Road Initiative Vows Green Infrastructure with Connectivity
Belt and Road Initiative Vows Green Infrastructure with Connectivity
– “My son in primary school did not attend a birthday celebration because it was cancelled due to bad air — and we live in Seoul, a great place to live,” said Dr. Frank Rijsberman, director-general of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI).
He was speaking to delegates of a forum that discussed creating environmental policies while enabling economic and regional cooperation among countries in the Belt and Road route during the 51st annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) that concluded over the weekend.
The forum took cues from Rijsberman’s story of living in Seoul, the capital city of South Korea, one of the poorest countries that in 50 years became an example for many developing countries to demonstrate the importance of economic growth while being mindful of air quality and the overall livability of the environment.
The “Green Growth and Regional Cooperation” forum was a side event hosted by GGGI with an expert panel that discussed China’s proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and, with many references to “green growth,” “green policies” and “green investments,” looked at putting in place policies to accelerate green investments and green technology while exploring ways to create opportunities that address poverty across countries.
“Climate change is already exacting its toll, particularly in the Asian region, so rapidly that technological and economic growth (that may have worsened issues like air quality) should also be our most immediate driver of action to do something,” said Rijsberman.
He said there is a need for countries to have “green growth,” a new development approach that delivers environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive economic growth that is low-carbon and climate resilient; prevents or remediates pollution; maintains healthy and productive ecosystems and creates green jobs, reduce poverty and enhance social inclusion.
Rijsberman said the GGGI will join the Green Belt and Road Coalition and currently cooperates with the China Ministry of Ecology and Environment and the ASEAN Center for Environmental Cooperation on regional cooperation and integration that facilitates sustainable urban development and supports high-level policies and impactful knowledge sharing on the adoption of sustainable growth in the Belt and Road countries.
Prof. Dongmei Guo, China state council expert of the China-ASEAN Environmental Cooperation Center, said the BRI brings together two regional trade corridors: the Silk Road Economic Belt that will link China with the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea though Central Asia and West Asia with three routes: China-Central Asia-Russia-Europe through the Baltic Sea; China-Central Asia-West Asia-Persian Gulf through the Mediterranean Sea and China- Southeast Asia-South Asia through the Indian Ocean; and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road that stretches from the South Pacific Sea to Europe with two roads — Coastal China-South China Sea-Indian Ocean-Europe and Coastal China-South China Sea and South Pacific.
The initiative covers more than 65 countries — or more than 60% of the world’s population — that includes Africa and Europe and plans to mobilize 150 billion dollars in investments over the next five years. Initiated in 2013, the BRI aims to create the world’s largest platform for economic cooperation, including policy coordination, trade and financing collaboration, and social and cultural cooperation.
“The BRI provides great opportunities for promoting green transformation and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2030,” said Guo, mentioning environmental-related SGDs 6, 12, 13, 14 and 15 as the same targets envisioned in the initiative. “The global sustainable development process has entered a new stage through the BRI and it must be green.”
Goals 6, 12, 13, 14 and 15 enjoin countries to ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation and sustainable consumption and production patterns, to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts, conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development and to protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.
Guo said among some of the concerns in the countries along the route are water shortages, water pollution, agricultural pollution, tailings, industrial wastes, and nuclear waste for Central Asia, biodiversity loss, water pollution and urbanization-led pollution in South Asia, and biodiversity, forest fire and haze brought by conventional pollution in Southeast Asia.
Winston Chow, GGGI country representative for China, said the program is still in its initial phase but is seeing an estimated investment of 500 billion dollars through 2030 that will be invested in the developing world along the BRI route, with 300 billion of that being carbon-related.
“What that means is that we have to consider the impacts of these economies in the long term and a major opportunity to decarbonize, which is a big step as we enhance global development,” he said. “We have to look at 2030 development goals and align our efforts at helping member countries contribute as they implement development projects.”
Organized under five guiding tasks of policy coordination, unimpeded trade, facilities connectivity financial integration, and people-to-people bond, Chow said the BRI aims to utilize Chinese government policy, financing and technology in enhancing strong projects in the developing world. The GGGI will facilitate the work with member states on how to deploy green projects and we have talked to a number of country governments such as those in Mongolia, Jordan, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Vietnam and the Philippines.”
He cited the strong collaboration with Mongolia after its policy makers were introduced to energy efficiency with air quality restrictions and environmental impact reductions through the introduction of the electric vehicles tariff in the capital Ulaanbaatar that successfully reduced bad air from 2016 to 2017.
Jordan, Indonesia and Ethiopia are also underway in their ecological restoration and water treatment practices. Transformative projects among Chinese technologies in solar energy use, e-transportation and e-mobility technology, land restoration, water and solid waste treatment and solar, wind and energy building efficiency projects will also be shared as well with participating countries.
But with BRI being recently introduced, Chow mentioned a few challenges in financing schemes such as gaps between what China wants to invest in and what developing countries are ready to do but have financial needs that are complex to underwrite. For instance, he said “the debate is still out on countries that have electricity grids not quite ready for global energy integration that may not necessarily yield benefits financially or socially.”