The Indonesian Government has been busy with the release of programmes for planting trees along the past years, while environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace and WALHI have been actively promoting an anti-afforestation attitude in the remaining forests of Indonesia.
Indonesia ranks 3 in the world according to tropical forest covered areas, following Brazil and Congo. Forests are enhabited by different species of flora and fauna, including rare species such as urangutans, Sumatran tigers and Komodo dragons.
However, forest covered areas have been rapidly declining due to logging activities and forest fires which were sometimes triggered by farmers to make way for plantations.
A number of domestic and international NGOs, such as WALHI (Indonesian Forum for Environment) and Greenpeace repeatedly demanded the Indonesian government to declare a legislation that would save the remaining forests - rare habitats, flora and fauna -- and for diminushing the impacts of climate change.
The Minister of Environment, Gusti Muhammad Hatta declared in Banjarmasin, last Friday, that the rate of forest destruction in Indonesia has reached 1.1 million hectares per year.
However, the Government had issued a strategy in this sector, since 2007, in order to cope with the impact of climate change by planting trees, in massive numbers.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, noticind „Planting Day” in Indonesia and The National Planting Month in West Java, in December 2009, urged the nation to plant 4 million trees by 2020 and 9.2 billion trees by 2050.
"If we reach half the target, the trees planted can absorb 46 billion carbon emissions by 2050. The figure is indeed pessimistic, but if we could plant more trees, much more CO2 could be captured, and this shall become our contribution to the world, " the president declared.
The Ministry of Forests has set a target for the rehabilitation of 500,000 hectares of forest covered areas, beginning with 2010.
Source: http://news.google.com |
