RFMRC-SEA – Page 18

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

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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.

Source: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/environment/spore-set-for-third-straight-haze-free-year

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Endangered Bornean Orangutans Threatened Further By Wildfires, Both Natural And Human-Made

By Himanshu Goenka @HimGoJourno
05/15/18 AT 5:26 AM

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.

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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.

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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 51^st 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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Indonesia to raise efforts to reduce haze

Vows to introduce measures to prevent blazes in fire-prone peatland areas

Konradus Epa, Jakarta – Indonesia

May 3, 2018

The Indonesian government has pledged to raise its efforts to reduce annual choking haze caused by forest fires and crop burning that blanket not only large parts of Indonesia but also several other Southeast Asian countries.

Declaring 2018 as a “zero smoke year”, Bambang Hendroyono, general secretary of the Environment and Forestry Ministry said the government has come up with a concrete plan to reduce the air pollution.

This involved closer monitoring of peatland areas — especially the activities of farmers — speeding up conservation and forest restoration efforts, wetting arid areas and public awareness campaigns.

“Conservation of peatlands is important to decrease the intensity of forest and peatland fires,” said Hendroyono, at a meeting on peatland management in Banjar, Central Kalimantan.

Preventing peatland — of which Indonesia has 14.9 million hectares — from catching fire is a key element of the government’s plan as it acts as a natural fuel and is very difficult to put out once a fire starts.

According to Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar, a fire has consumed more than 3 million hectares of peatland in the last three years.

“Conservation of peatland is important to decrease the intensity of forest and peatlands fires,” Hendroyono said.

Father Frans Sani Lake, head of the church-run Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation group in the Kalimantan region responded by warning the government that it would take a mammoth effort to significantly reduce fires and that they would remain a big threat, particularly during the dry season.

“Being free from haze is a dream of all people. But, we must be realistic and be prepared,” he told ucanews.com.

The priest said the church has urged Catholics — through homilies, catechism, and announcements in churches — to be wary of activities that trigger forest fires.

Sacred Heart Father Ansel Amo, who heads Merauke Archdiocese’s Justice, Peace, and Integrity of Creation Commission in Papua, welcomed the government’s move.

“All should respond to this, which serves as a reminder for all of us to protect forests and peatlands, particularly during the dry season,” he said.

Annisa Rahmawati, Senior Forest Campaigner at Greenpeace Southeast Asia said such a commitment to reduce fires must be ongoing.

She said this year there has already been a 20 percent increase on the 2,400 hotspots found last year.

“We hope the government promise is turned into real action,” she told ucanews.com.

Source Link: https://www.ucanews.com/news/indonesia-to-raise-efforts-to-reduce-haze/82201

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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

Thomson Reuters Foundation

Wednesday 25 April 2018

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/