The number of Americans who occasionally think about Indonesia is only slightly higher than the number of Americans who can find it on a world map, but I'm asking you to think about this southeast Asian country today. Indonesia's annual fire peat-burning season is unusually severe this year. Here's what caught my eye, from Yahoo Finance (October 2, 2015).
Jakarta (AFP) - The forest fires blanketing Southeast Asia in choking haze are on track to become among the worst on record, NASA has warned, with a prolonged dry season hampering efforts to curb a crisis that has persisted for nearly two decades...
The fires smolder beneath the surface of carbon-rich peatlands, feeding off vast quantities of fuel, making them extremely difficult to curb as millions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions are released into the atmosphere.
The NASA-linked Global Fire Emissions Database has estimated around 600 million tonnes of greenhouse gases have been released as a result of this year's fires - roughly equivalent to Germany's entire annual output.
Impressive! Kinda gives us a new perspective on all those solar panels in Germany, doesn't it?
Wild fires are of course a natural phenomenon. So when NASA tells us
we might be inclined to ask "so what?" On the other hand, there are 7.25 billion people on Earth, all of whom are trying to make a living, and that's what is causing these Indonesian fires (The Guardian, October 5, 2015).
The illegal burning of forests and agricultural land across Indonesia has blanketed much of south-east Asia in an acrid haze, leading to one of the most severe regional shutdowns in years.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Indonesia needs to convict plantation companies for the noxious smoke, created by the annual destruction of plants during the dry season. Burning the land is a quick way to ready the soil for new seed.
“We want Indonesia to take action,” he was quoted as saying by the state news agency Bernama, adding the smog was affecting the economy. “Indonesia alone can gather evidence and convict the companies concerned.”
And here's another eye-catcher.
[Indonesia] is the fifth largest emitter of greenhouse gases, according to the World Resources Institute think tank. Jakarta promised last week at the United Nations to curb emissions by 2030.
That's also impressive, but is it true? Let's turn to Carbon Brief to see what's going on (September 25, 2015). Indonesia recently released its INDC plan to reduce emissions by 2030 (see here to understand INDCs).
As well as being hazy on policy and financing needs, it is also difficult to gauge the ambition of Indonesia's INDC emissions targets. This is despite the document including a projected figure for BAU emissions in 2030 of 2.9 billion tons [gigatons, Gt] of CO2 equivalent (Gt CO2e).
The pledge to reduce emissions by at least 29% compared to this trajectory means an effective cap in 2030 of 2Gt CO2e. With the more ambitious 41% reduction compared to BAU, the cap would be 1.7Gt CO2e. The UK's emissions are 0.5Gt CO2e and China's around 12.5Gt CO2e.
This apparently clear-cut picture for Indonesia's climate pledge is misleading, however. Climate Action Tracker's evaluation of Jakarta's previous climate pledges says "the uncertainty of LULUCF [land use, land use change and forestry] emissions makes an evaluation difficult".
More than half of Indonesia's annual emissions come from deforestation and peatland fires. Some of these are naturally-occurring, but many more are started deliberately - and illegally - to clear and re-clear land for crops, such as palm oil.
This year , and in other dry years related to El Nino - forest fires can run out of control, causing dangerous smogs across south-east Asia. These fires can cause multi-billion tonne spikes in Indonesia's greenhouse gas emissions.
Yet these emissions are hard to measure, requiring estimates of the land area affected as well as the depth of peat soils that have burnt. Variation between different inventories gives a sense of the resulting uncertainty in Indonesia's emissions.
The World Resources Institute (WRI) CAIT database puts 2012 emissions including LULUCF at 2Gt CO2e, making Indonesia the world's fifth largest emitter that year.
Yet the EU's EDGAR database puts emissions, again including LULUCF, at 0.8Gt CO2e - less than half the CAIT figure.
Hmmm, that's not helpful.
There are also large discrepancies for 2005. Indonesia's own national submission to the UN reports emissions of 1.8Gt CO2e, while CAIT has 1.6Gt CO2e and EDGAR 1.2Gt CO2e.
In order to understand how ambitious the Indonesian climate pledge is, we need to know how the 2030 targets compare to current emissions. As we've seen, that's far from straightforward.
The chart below is an attempt to gauge the situation. It draws on Indonesia's first and second national communications to the UNFCCC that report emissions for 1990-1994 and 2000-2005. The emissions trajectories to 2030 reflect Indonesia's INDC pledges and its projections of BAU.
Indonesia's past emissions and its targets for 2030. Historical emissions, shown in red and orange, are from Indonesia's two official submissions to the UN. The hatched bars show a linear trend for years without officially-reported emissions. This fails to show large LULUCF emissions in 1997, estimated at 0.8 - 2.7 Gt CO2e, which were caused by forest fires. The hatched grey and blue bars show linear paths to the 2030 BAU, conditional and unconditional targets. Chart by Carbon Brief.
The chart above suggests Indonesia's 29% or 41% reductions against BAU emissions in 2030 would amount to preventing any increase on recent levels. However, given the uncertainty in year-to-year emissions from Indonesia, this is itself uncertain.
That's probably way more detail than you wanted. Anyway, it would seem that we're not much wiser than we were before I quoted Carbon Brief, due to the uncertainty surrounding LULUCF emissions. Love that acronym!
I should point out that if humans want to curb global emissions, it would be good to know at the outset what those emissions actually are
On the other hand, it seems clear enough that Indonesia's LULUCF emissions are on a pace to smash previous records, thus making German solar panels even more irrelevant.
Here's more from Yahoo Finance (via AFP).
Though the crisis grips the region nearly ever year during the dry season, scientists predict the current outbreak could surpass 1997 levels, when out-of-control forest fires sent pollution soaring to record highs in an environmental disaster that cost an estimated USD $9 billion.
If the forecasted dry conditions extend, the region could be enveloped in even denser smog, exacerbating a crisis that has seen flights grounded, schools closed and tens of thousands of people seek medical treatment for respiratory problems.
“Conditions in Singapore and southeastern Sumatra are tracking close to 1997,” Robert Field, a Columbia University scientist based at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was quoted as saying by the US science agency...
An El Nino weather system has made conditions drier than usual in Indonesia, but authorities are hoping much-needed rains will arrive within a month to finally douse the blazes...
How bad is it? You be the judge. Here's Indonesia.
And here's Indonesia from space on September 25, 2015 (from the NASA Earth Observatory).
"Along with colleagues at NASA and the University of California, Irvine, van der Werf has developed a technique to estimate the amount of trace gases and airborne particles that fires emit—many of them pollutants—based on satellite observations of fires and vegetation cover. The project, known as the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED), produces both regional and global estimates of fire emissions based on data from 1997 to the present. According to the GFED analysis, the 2015 Indonesia fires have released greenhouse gases equivalent to about 600 million tons through September 22, a number that rivals a year of carbon emissions from Germany."
And the worst may be yet to come.
But in more bad news, the worst of the smog shrouding the region could be yet to come.
Herry Purnomo, a haze expert at the Indonesia-based Centre for International Forestry Research, told AFP the dry season was not expected to peak in Sumatra until next month, when more smoke was predicted.
"It's not over yet," he said, adding the economic cost of the "horrendous" fires would be as bad as 1997.
It's not over yet. Truer words were never spoken.
Right, for Homo sapiens, it's not over yet
It was over the minute we raised the first rock above our heads.
Posted by: Paul | 10/07/2015 at 04:14 PM