Prince Charles cautions over ‘climate crunch’

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta, Tue, 11/04/2008

 

Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, on Monday called for reforestation to combat climate change, warning its effects were as immediate and damaging as the current global financial crisis.

The world should not underestimate he risk of the “climate runch” that would affect a reater number of people than those affected by the credit runch, he said in his lecture hosted by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono at the State Palace in Central Jakarta.

“Climate change is the greatest manifestation of a crisis between man and nature.

That’s why now is the time for the world to come together as one to find solutions,” the Prince of Wales said.

“We have just proven we can do it to tackle the global financial crisis. That is because the credit crunch is having immediate and damaging effects on the whole world, but so is the climate crunch.”

Charles said it was feared the effects would not be temporary, and if left unchecked,“It will change the economic, social and physical geography of the world in ways that we can barely begin to imagine”.

He pointed out that Indonesia, as an archipelago comprising more than 17,000 islands and a coastline of more than 80,000 kilometers, would be left vulnerable to rising sea levels that are already affecting coastal settlements here.

All international efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals would be worth nothing unless the world acted now against climate change because poverty and environmental degradation were so intimately linked, he added.

“What we can do now is halt the destruction of the world’s rainforests in order to ensure that the forests do what they are so good at: storing carbon naturally,”he said.

It was a far easier, cheaper and quicker option than relying on unproven technology to capture carbon at a cost of some $50 per ton, he added.

The Prince of Wales’ speech comes just a month before some 190 countries worldwide gather at Poznan, Poland, for a UN climate change conference.

Charles also thanked Indonesia for its key role in an international climate conference in Bali last year, during which the country provided a proper priority for rainforests within climate negotiations.

He said he was pleased to see an example of what the country was doing when he visited the Harapan rainforest in Jambi on Sunday.

“In just 18 months, the Harapan rainforest initiative has achieved tremendous results on the ground, curtailing illegal logging, regenerating degraded forest and creating secure jobs for locals in forest conservation,”he said.

The Harapan forest restoration project was jointly initiated by a consortium of local NGOs, Burung Indonesia, the London-based Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and Birdlife International.

Charles also outlined his rainforest project, through which he has initiated an emergency fund to provide incentives to rainforest nations to implement eco-services while developing their economies without cutting down forests.

He said such a funding scheme should be promptly conducted because the world could not afford a delay before the successor to the Kyoto Protocol was fully operational with a carbon credit mechanism.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said Indonesia had taken steps to address the deforestation issue both globally and domestically.

“Domestically, we actively protect our forests, by preventing forest fires, fighting illegal loggers and implementing a long-term plan to preserve and expand our forest cover,” he said.

“Internationally, we are ensuring that REDD will become an integral part of the new post-2012 climate change framework that is now being formulated.”

The country had also taken the initiative to convene a meeting of 11 rainforest nations on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, he added.