Indonesia to protest Yale University environment report

Jul 14, 2008, 7:21 GMT

Jakarta - Indonesia will lodge a formal protest against Yale University for its environmental performance index (EPI) report, which ranked Indonesia one of the world's least environmentally friendly countries, a local news report said Monday.

The Jakarta Post reported that Amanda Katili, the State Ministry for the Environment's special expert on climate change, was scheduled to fly to the United States Monday to present the newest forestry data in an attempt to refute the EPI report.

State Minister of the Environment Rachmat Witoelar was quoted as saying the report was unfair. 'It is absurd because all the data is invalid,' he said.

The EPI report, published in the US magazine Newsweek's July 7-14 edition, ranked Indonesia 102nd out of 149 countries in environmental matters.

'Where the two biggest carbon emitters, China and the United States, have coal plants and cars to blame, the number 3 culprit - Indonesia - produces 85 per cent of its carbon emissions from forest,' the report in Newsweek said.

The report said that forests were almost wiped out on heavily populated Java island, while Sumatra lost 35 per cent of its forest and Kalimantan lost 19 per cent in the 1990s. Deforestation is also threatening the Sumatran rhinoceros and the orang-utan with extinction.

'In the forestry component of Yale and Columbia's Environmental Performance Index, Indonesia comes in last with a score of zero,' it said.

Katili as quoted by the Post as saying she would present Yale researchers with the new forestry data available at the Forestry Ministry Website and the Food and Agriculture Organization website.

'It is the researchers' own fault if they don't understand Indonesian language. They could have contacted us for the latest data before publishing the EPI ranking,' she said.

Indonesia has 120 million hectares of rain forest. The Post reported the deforestation rate between 1987 and 1997 was 1.8 million hectares annually. Forest fires between the year 1998 and 2000 raised the rate to 2.8 million hectares per year, before falling back to 1.8 million hectares per year between 2000 and 2006, according to government figures.