Tony Hotland, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Policies involving the national weather forecast agency and farmers must be enacted to enable Indonesia to adapt to the grave effects of global warming and evade disruptions in food provision, a climate change seminar has been told.
Scientists agree climate change has already begun unsettling the arrival of seasons and causing unseasonal fluctuations in temperatures, which are key to rice field cycles, agriculture and biodiversity.
With this in mind, experts agreed at a seminar Thursday that adaptation was as important as mitigation -- seen as more global and political -- in the battle against global warming.
Climate change is causing the arrival of seasons to be more erratic and tends to produce shorter wet seasons with more rainfall and longer dry seasons with prolonged water shortages.
As a result, Indonesia has much to lose given that rice is its staple food and most Indonesians work in the agricultural sector.
Head of the Agricultural and Climate Agency at the Agriculture Ministry, Kasdi Subagyono, said the adaptation measures would include drawing up a dynamic plantation calendar for each plant and natural condition, creating new varieties of plants resilient to barren weather and implementing efficient irrigation methods and water conservation.
"Upgrading the Meteorology and Geophysics Agency (BMG) so it can come up with more accurate and far-reaching forecasts, say for a year ahead, would help with the drawing up of the calendar. If this can be distributed to the farmers, it would make a big difference," he said at a seminar on biodiversity and global warming hosted by green group Kehati.
"We've completed some calendar drafts for some seasons and weather conditions and we're now trying them out in areas to seek improvement."
Kasdi said new varieties of rice, corn and potato should have shorter harvesting lives to match shorter wet seasons.
"So the farmers must be largely included in these efforts because we're depending on them more than ever," he said.
Indonesia has become an occasional rice importer due to frequent harvesting failures in the country's crops.
Rizaldi Boer from the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB) said global warming had already damaged Indonesia's rice-harvest cycle, leading to decreased production capabilities.
"In Java, the cycle is 1.6 (harvests) per year compared to 2 some years before, meaning we no longer harvest rice twice a year. Outside Java, the cycle is even lower at 1.1 times," he said.
While most participants focused on the effects global warming would have on agriculture and food production, the seminar also discussed the ability of flora and fauna to adapt to changes. For example, it is expected fish populations in Indonesia will move southward to Australia due to sea current changes.
Global warming has taken the world by storm as one of the most discussed topics over the past two years.
The Kyoto Protocol, under which 38 industrialized Annex I countries excluding the U.S. and Australia vowed to cut greenhouse gas emissions, seems to be moving in an uncertain direction.
Triggered by greenhouse gases, which are predominantly the result of mass energy production and deforestation, trapped in the atmosphere, global warming is destroying biodiversity in the world's seas, killing animals and plants and triggering the outbreak of viruses and bacteria that pose global threats to human health.
Suryo Wiyono and Antonius Suwanto, both IPB lecturers, said at the seminar that current research indicates the escalation of plant pests and cholera outbreaks correlate directly with temperature increases.
Environmental groups have called on the government to actively propose reforestation projects to Annex I nations in the carbon trading scheme and switch to using renewable sources for energy production.
Indonesia is the world's third biggest greenhouse gas emitter after the U.S. and China, the result of forest fires and unbridled deforestation.
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