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| A 3-day-old Javan Surili sipping milk from a zoo keeper at Tamansari Zoo in Bandung, West Java, on Monday. The Presbytis comatas primates are listed on the International Union Conservation of Nature’s endangered species list and live in Java’s tropical forests. (JG Photo/Rezza Estily) |
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Indonesia
might lay claim to being the country with the second-highest level of
biodiversity in the world after Brazil, but the government has no database to catalogue
that wealth, an official says.
Vidya S.
Nalang, the head of the Environment Ministry’s Genetic Resources Management
Program, said over the weekend that all the government had was a clearing house
with limited information on resources such as plant and animal species.
“We used to
have a database with the full data from 2005-10 on the medicinal properties [of
plants],” she said. “But we had to take it down pending negotiations for the
Nagoya Protocol.”
The
protocol, part of the Convention on Biological Diversity, which Indonesia has
ratified, aims to regulate the use of genes from plants or animals that
originate in other countries and ensure that all nations are compensated fairly
for discoveries that are derived from their native species.
Vidya said
that in the absence of a government agency to compile a database of the
country’s biodiversity, the state had assigned the Indonesian Institute of
Sciences (LIPI) to take over the task, given that it already had its own
database and research.
Indonesia
is ranked in the top 5 worldwide for its plant biodiversity, with 55 percent of
that diversity endemic to Indonesia, according to the CBD.
In
addition, the archipelago is home to 12 percent of the world’s mammals, 17
percent of its birds and 16 percent of reptiles, while its waters are home to
450 of the 700 coral species in the world.
The LIPI
previously said that as of 2010, it had identified and catalogued at least 2.5
million specimens of fauna and 2 million specimens of plants but that efforts
to build up a comprehensive database were held back by a lack of government
attention and old, crashing computers.
“Because we
have limited technology but plenty to upload, the computer crashed a few years
ago,” Siti Nuramaliati Prijono, director of LIPI’s Center for Biology, said
last March. “The scientists then got upset because when they tried to upload
their data, it all disappeared. Now we have the system up and running, but not
all the data can be accessed at the same time. Some of the data is hosted on
the old system and the rest on the new one.”
Siti said
another problem was that after all the trouble involved in uploading the data,
the information was mostly left unused, even by experts in the country.
The
government’s response at the time was that it would set up a working database
prior to a key meeting on the Nagoya Protocol in New York last May. However,
the site meant to host the data, www.biology.lipi.go.id, has been blank since
last year.
Arief
Yuwono, the deputy head for environmental damage control and climate change at
the Environment Ministry, said last year that part of the problem was that
biodiversity issues were being shunted aside in favor of more popular issues
such as climate change.
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