Category: Regional

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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)

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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/

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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

Audrey Tan Environment Correspondent Luke Anthony Tan

Singapore looks set to see a third straight year with no haze, due in part to Indonesia’s sustained efforts at curbing fires and preventing their spread.

Indonesia’s Minister of National Development Planning Bambang Brodjonegoro said yesterday that the 2015 haze crisis would not repeat itself this year.

“In the last few years, including this year, we did not have the haze that happened in 2015,” he said, adding that forestry and peatland management plans have already been implemented. Dr Bambang was speaking at the fifth Singapore Dialogue on Sustainable World Resources held at the Grand Hyatt Singapore hotel. The event was organised by think-tank Singapore Institute of International Affairs.

His statement echoes similar promises made by other Indonesian officials last year and in 2016.

The haze in Singapore is largely caused by winds blowing smoke from forest fires in Indonesia. Many of Indonesia’s pulpwood and oil palm plantations are located on carbon-rich peatlands. When these areas are drained of water for planting, the risk of fire increases.

In 2015, Indonesia’s dry season coincided with the El Nino weather phenomenon, which is linked to warmer and drier weather in this part of the world.

The bad weather exacerbated the forest fires typical of the country’s agro-forestry landscape, and caused the region to suffer the worst haze crisis on record.

Since then, Indonesia has taken significant steps to reduce the occurrence of fires, said Dr Nirarta Samadhi, country director of research organisation World Resources Institute Indonesia.

Speaking to the media on the sidelines of yesterday’s event, Dr Samadhi pointed to three ways that the Indonesian government has demonstrated its commitment to dealing with the haze issue.

The first was the formation in 2016 of the Peatland Restoration Agency, which was tasked with carrying out programmes to restore Indonesia’s carbon-rich peatlands.

To this end, new regulations were rolled out, such as a land swop scheme aiming to get companies off deep peatlands and to move to mineral soils instead, said Dr Samadhi.

The Indonesian government also conducted mapping exercises using Lidar technology to provide data on water levels. If water table levels are too low, peatlands could become more flammable.

Dr Samadhi said these government initiatives have contributed to the clear skies in the region in the past three years.

But other factors not within direct control, such as the weather, played a role too. “Recently, we have also had the advantage of having wetter weather,” Dr Samadhi said.

Sub-national elections in Indonesia could also have contributed to the haze-free skies, as local politicians would have greater incentive to prevent fires, Dr Samadhi said.

Given the role that unpredictable factors play in contributing to the haze, he added, it is hard to predict if South-east Asia could achieve its target of being haze-free by 2020. The target was set by Asean environment ministers after the 2015 crisis.

Ms Zhang Wen, executive director of volunteer group People’s Movement to Stop Haze (PM.Haze), said that for Asean to reach its 2020 target, financial institutions need to play their part.

“We hope local and regional banks can develop clear policies on not financing companies linked to unsustainable practices, such as slash-and-burn techniques, deforestation, and peat drainage. They should also develop clear timelines to help their clients to improve their practices, by adhering to standards set out in eco-certification schemes,” she said.

A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on May 19, 2018, with the headline ‘S’pore set for third straight haze-free year’.
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Cracking a climate conundrum

Cracking a climate conundrum

By 
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.

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Belt and Road Initiative Vows Green Infrastructure with Connectivity

Belt and Road Initiative Vows Green Infrastructure with Connectivity

By Diana G Mendoza

MANILA, May 8 2018 (IPS) – “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.”

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Accelerate efforts to address air pollution: WHO to South-East Asian countries

Accelerate efforts to address air pollution: WHO to South-East Asian countries

THE NEWS SCROLL 02 MAY 2018  Last Updated at 6:29 PM

New Delhi, May 2 The WHO today called upon member countries in the South-East Asia region to aggressively address the issue of pollution, saying it accounts for 34 percent of the seven million premature deaths caused by household and ambient air pollution together globally every year.

This comes in the wake of a report of the global health body which puts Delhi and 13 other Indian cities in the list of 20 most-polluted cities in the world in terms of PM2.5 levels in 2016.

Stating that air pollution contributes significantly to non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and lung cancer, Poonam Khetrapal Singh, Regional Director of WHO South-East Asia, stressed on the need for investment in effective urban planning with energy-efficient housing and power generation, building safe and affordable public transport systems and improving industry and municipal waste management.

She also sought elimination of the emissions from coal and biomass energy systems, proper management of agricultural waste, forest fires and agro-forestry activities such as charcoal production and support the transition to exclusive use of clean household energy for cooking, heating, and lighting.

Singh drew attention to the example of India’s Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala scheme under which, in the last two years, 37 million women living below the poverty line were provided free LPG connections to support them to switch to clean household energy use. The country targets to reach 80 million households by 2020.

“The availability of clean household energy affects us all and our families and is a key to sustainable development. All countries in the region are making efforts to expand the availability of clean fuels and technologies, however, over 60 percent population do not have clean fuel,” she said.

She said that individuals should also contribute by valuing the environment and adopting behavioral changes such as using public transport or ‘soot-free’ vehicles, using clean, low-or no-emission stoves and fuels for cooking and reducing and disposing of household waste in an environmentally sound manner.

The combined effects of household air pollution and ambient air pollution become increasingly hard to address if not tackled early, the World Health Organization official said. The majority of countries in the region are at early stages of accelerated urbanization and rapid industrialization.

“Hence, air pollution needs to be brought under control with urgent and effective action at the earliest to stand the best chance to prevent the situation from worsening as development proceeds,” Singh said.

Of the 3.8 million deaths caused by household air pollution globally, the region accounts for 1.5 million or 40 percent deaths, and of the 4.2 million global deaths due to ambient (outdoor) air pollution, 1.3 million or 30 percent are reported from the region, according to the latest WHO report.

Delhi and Varanasi are among the 14 Indian cities that figured in a list of 20 most polluted cities in the world in terms of PM2.5 levels in 2016, according to a data released by the WHO.

The WHO data also said that nine out of 10 people in the world breathe air containing high levels of pollutants.

Other Indian cities that registered very high levels of PM2.5 pollutants were Kanpur, Faridabad, Gaya, Patna, Agra, Muzaffarpur, Srinagar, Gurgaon, Jaipur, Patiala and Jodhpur followed by Ali Subah Al-Salem in Kuwait and a few cities in China and Mongolia.

In terms of PM10 levels, 13 cities in India figured among the 20 most-polluted cities of the world in 2016.

Source Link: https://www.outlookindia.com/newsscroll/accelerate-efforts-to-address-air-pollution-who-to-southeast-asian-countries/1299781

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Asian Games to boost Indonesia’s war on forest fires

Asian Games to boost Indonesia’s war on forest fires

Thomson Reuters Foundation

Every dry season, large parts of Southeast Asia are shrouded in pollution caused by forest fires in Indonesia, many sets deliberately to clear land for pulp and paper and palm oil plantations. What’s the government doing about this?

Indonesia’s choking annual haze will be limited this year by the pressure of hosting the Asian Games and a new approach to preventing forest fires, a senior official said on Tuesday.

Every dry season—usually from June until October—large parts of Southeast Asia are shrouded in pollution caused by forest fires in Indonesia, many sets deliberately to clear land for pulp and paper and palm oil plantations.

Indonesia’s government switched focus from containment to prevention after a particularly bad outbreak in 2015 that cost the country $16 billion and caused more than 500,000 people to come down with respiratory ailments.

“Before 2015 it was all about suppressing the fires, but now it’s about prevention,” said Raffles Panjaitan, director of forest and land fire management at the forestry ministry.

If the haze comes, then aeroplanes cannot get through and land, which will stop the athletes.

Raffles Panjaitan, director, forest and land fire management, Ministry of Forestry

The spotlight on Indonesia as it hosts the 2018 Asian Games from Aug. 18 to Sept. 2 makes it all the more important to tackle the problem, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“If the haze comes, then aeroplanes cannot get through and land, which will stop the athletes,” he said on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Rainforest Summit in Yogyakarta, on the Indonesian island of Java.

“It’s important for us,” he said of the Games, which will be co-hosted by the Sumatran city of Palembang and Jakarta.

Over the last three years, Indonesia has introduced a range of new policies including educating and training communities in fire prevention and setting up a Peatland Restoration Agency to tackle fires and protect peatland, said Panjaitan.

Peatlands—made up of partially decayed vegetation, typically saturated with water—hold huge amounts of carbon, and are important habitats for endangered species, like tigers, according to the campaign group Greenpeace.

It has drafted in the military, built early warning towers and organized patrols to monitor the burning, he said.

Panjaitan said better coordination of local governments, villagers, and companies could help reduce the risk.

Local leaders may turn a blind eye to burning of peatlands for fear of losing votes in elections later this year, he added.

Experts said the haze problem, which affects Malaysia and Singapore as well as Indonesia, would only be resolved if governments and the private sector, including the palm oil and aviation industries, came together to tackle it jointly.

“You need to take the people that are potentially the most affected—including the private sector—and sit everybody around the table to sort this out,” said Robert Nasi, head of the Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research.

Link: http://www.eco-business.com/news/asian-games-to-boost-indonesias-war-on-forest-fires/

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Chiang Rai Province to Use Geo-Informatics and Space Technology to Combat Forest Fires

April 25, 2018
RFMRC SEA

Chiang Rai Province to Use Geo-Informatics and Space Technology to Combat Forest Fires By Editor on…

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Entering the dry season, watch out for fire in forest and plantation area

Entering the dry season, watch out for a fire in forest and plantation area

Wednesday, Apr 18, 2018, | 02:11 pm

News24xx.com – Some parts of Indonesia region had entered dry season this month. Some regions need to cautious of forest and land area blaze.

“Facing dry season this year, we need to be more cautious for a fire in forest and plantation areas,” said Head of BMKG (Meteorology, Climatology and Geology agencies), Dwikorita Karnawati in her statement, Tuesday, April 17th, 2018

The region where vulnerable of happening of Karhutla (fire of forest and plantation areas), which are Aceh and North Sumatra, South Sumatra, West Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan, East Kalimantan, Gorontalo, South Sulawesi, North Sulawesi and  South Papua

Entering the dry season, some areas of Indonesia are affected by weak category of La Nina and can be moved to its normal conditions in September 2018.  BMKG clarified that there was no indication of abnormal weather.

“BMKG predicted that the Indian Ocean is constantly in the normal condition in April up to September 2018,” said Dwikora.

Wind circulation has been dominated by Australia monsoon wind (eastern) almost in all Indonesia region from the southern equator. Eastern wind brings dry wind from the Australian continent.

News24xx.com/fik/red

(***)

Link: http://www.news24xx.com/read/news/6188/Entering-the-dry-season-watch-out-for-fire-in-forest-and-plantation-area

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Dried Melaleuca forest poses risk of fire

Dried Melaleuca forest poses risk of fire

Update: April, 17/2018 – 15:00

Viet Nam News CÀ MAU — The 43,000ha U Minh Hạ Melaleuca forest has been completely dry since Monday, according to forest rangers of the Mekong Delta province of Cà Mau.

This puts 4,200ha of the forest area under forest fire danger level 5 (very high) and another 14,600ha under danger level 4 (high). Most of this area falls in the communes of Nguyễn Phích, Khánh An and Khánh Lâm in U Minh District and Khánh Bình and Tây Bắc communes in Trần Văn Thời District.

Many measures have been put in place to protect the forest, prevent fire and regularly track water levels to issue timely forest fire forecasts as well as mobilise adequate contingency forces.

The provincial forest ranger has conducted several awareness campaigns, calling for individuals to take fire prevention measures and teaching local residents to put out a fire.

Authorities have also warned against collecting honey in the dry season and have set up warning signs in the forest.

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