Indonesia and World Tourism News

Mangroves help Indonesia fend off climate change

By Adhityani Arga

SUWUNG KAUH, Indonesia, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Dark, foul-smelling mangrove swamps can help Indonesia’s coastal communities fend off rising seas and stronger tropical storms caused by climate change, experts say.

As 190 nations meet for Dec. 3-14 U.N. climate talks on the resort island of Bali, looking for ways to broaden a pact to slow down global warming, experts say mangroves are not getting the attention they deserve as a protective coastal barrier.

“Mangroves are a natural way to lessen the severity of the impact (of climate change) to coastal communities,” said urban planning and climate change expert Enda Atmawidjaja.

“They are natural sea barriers, and they are also much cheaper then building sea walls made of concrete.”

Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of 17,000 islands, is extremely vulnerable to a rise in sea levels, storm surges or more intense tropical storms linked to global warming.

The U.N. climate panel says seas could rise by 18 to 59 cms (7-23 inches) by 2100. More than 40 million of Indonesia’s 220 million population live less than 10 meters above sea level.

Mangroves are trees and shrubs that grow along a saline strip along the coast, now and then swamped by tides. The thin roots provide a habitat for shrimps and small fish, break up waves and hold back silt and soil from that damage coral reefs.

Mangroves can keep rising seas at bay to a certain extent, giving communities more time to adjust. The trees can help people cope with heatwaves and help break up waves in the event of a tropical storm.

DEFORESTED

But decades of rampant development along Indonesia’s 57,000 kms (35,000 miles) coastline have left nearly 70 percent of its 5 million hectares (12 million acres) of mangrove forests deforested or degraded, scientist Hiroyuki Hatori told Reuters.

“Indonesia is the world’s number one country in terms of mangroves. Some statistics say that 25 percent of the world’s mangrove exist in Indonesia,” said Hatori. “However in many areas of Indonesia mangroves are fast receding.”

Like in many parts of Indonesia, vast swathes of mangrove forest in “the neck of Bali”, a strip of land that connects a tiny peninsula in the south to the main part of the island, were turned into shrimp ponds during a boom in the 1980s.

But the ponds were soon abandoned, leaving large areas barren. Scientists later discovered that violent waves were chipping away at the coast, sparking fears that lower part of the island could be cut off in a decade’s time.

A government project sponsored by Japan’s development arm set off in the early 1990s to restore the area’s vast mangroves, filling about 1,000 hectares of land with nearly 20 types of mangrove.

It became the first big-scale restoration project in Indonesia, with a mangrove nursery supplying free saplings to 18 restoration projects across Indonesia.

Today, project head Sasmitohadi said Indonesia has made giant leaps in its effort to preserve mangrove forests, but the increasing demand for settlements in the world’s fourth most populous nation is putting pressure on the mangrove forests.

“To be honest, human beings are the biggest threat to mangroves,” Sasmitohadi said. Small-scale conversion into shrimp and fish ponds also continue to pose a threat to mangroves.

“Indonesia should step up its conservation efforts for the world’s next generation,” Hatori said. “There are only 18 million hectares of mangrove forests left in the world, once degraded, it would be difficult to recover.”

(Editing by Alister Doyle)
Source: http://www.reuters.com/

Add comment December 7th, 2007

Malaysian ambassador denies claiming Indonesia’s traditional arts

Esther Samboh, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Malaysia did not ever lay claim to Indonesia’s traditional arts, including songs, dances, fabrics, puppet theater and musicals, Malaysian Ambassador to Indonesia Dato Zainal Abidin Zain said Wednesday.

“Read our website, we never claimed any of Indonesia’s traditional arts as our own,” Dato said.

“It has been exaggerated by irresponsible parties who have negative motives to spoil our good relations with Indonesia.”

The ambassador was speaking to a group of journalists at the Malaysian Embassy in Jakarta and he said he wanted his statement to put an end to the controversy, which has ignited outrage among Indonesians.

Media reports from Kuala Lumpur said the Malaysian government also agreed on Tuesday to drop from its latest tourism campaign two dances with Indonesian origins.

Dato said culture was an emotional matter and that it would be easy to provoke two sides by playing with cultural sensitivities.

In October, Indonesia accused Malaysia of using the republic’s traditional song Rasa Sayange (Feeling of Love) as a background song in its tourism campaign.

Numerous cultural copyright issues followed, because Indonesian traditional arts had been used by Malaysia in its tourism campaign but never claimed as Malay in origin.

Dato said Indonesia had yet to present its facts regarding the controversy.

“Recently, there have been rumors spreading through the internet among Indonesian and Malaysian youngsters to hate each other using Indonesia-Malaysia bilateral issues,” Dato said.

“This should immediately be curbed and things must be made clear (for both sides).”

The relations between Indonesia and Malaysia have been impacted recently by issues including Indonesian immigrant workers’ rights, forest fire haze and overlapping territorial claims.

Last week, activists demonstrated outside the Malaysian Embassy in Jakarta, slamming Kuala Lumpur for promoting in its tourism campaign Indonesia’s traditional masked dance Reog, which comes originally from Ponorogo, East Java.

“It was a sigh of relief after hearing the Ambassador’s clarification that Malaysia never claimed Reog as its own and it was brought by Javanese people to Malaka,” Ponorogo’s Regent Muhadi Suyono told journalists.

Suyono said he hoped in the future, Malaysia would identify `Reog’ properly so that people would realize its origin.

Mukhlis Paeni, the director general for arts, films and cultural values at the Culture and Tourism Ministry, said Indonesian and Malaysian governments will discuss the feasibility of jointly promoting both countries’ performing arts.

“The joint promotion will be attempted so that when people see Malaysian tourism campaigns with Reog masked dances, they will also know that it is originally part of Indonesia’s traditional culture,” he said.

Source: The Jakarta Post

Add comment December 7th, 2007