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  Yahoo News 29 Jan 07
Global warming may affect Indonesia isles

PlanetArk 30 Jan 07
Indonesia May Lose 2,000 Islands to Climate Change

INDONESIA: January 30, 2007 JAKARTA - Indonesia could lose about 2,000 islands by 2030 due to climate change, the country's environment minister said on Monday.

Rachmat Witoelar said studies by UN experts showed that sea levels were expected to rise about 89 centimetres in 2030 which meant that about 2,000 mostly uninhabited small islets would be submerged.

"We are still in a better position. Island countries like Saint Lucia, Fiji and the Bahamas would likely disappear," he told Reuters.

Indonesia, which consists of 17,000 islands, has been trying to avert such a scenario by reducing reliance on fossil fuels and switching to bio-fuels, he said. "We are optimistic it can be prevented. Switching to bio-fuels is not only good for the environment but also will benefit us economically considering the volatile state of oil prices," he said.

Biofuels can be substituted for fossil fuels and are seen as a way to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases which are believed to contribute to global warming.

A major UN conference on climate change will be held in the Indonesian island of Bali in December. A draft UN report due to be released in Paris on Feb. 2 projects a big rise in temperatures this century and warns of more heat waves, floods, droughts and rising seas linked to greenhouse gases.

World leaders signed a UN Climate Convention in 1992 with an overriding goal of stabilising greenhouse gases at levels preventing "dangerous (human) interference with the climate system".

However, it did not define "dangerous" and the issue has been a vexed point in efforts to slow climate change ever since.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, the UN plan for fighting global warming, 35 industrial nations have agreed to cut emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. US President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of the protocol in 2001, saying it would damage the US economy and wrongly exempted developing nations from the first phase.

Yahoo News 29 Jan 07
Global warming may affect Indonesia isles

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Rising sea levels because of global warming stand to inundate around 2,000 islands in Indonesia by 2030, the country's environment minister said Monday.

The assessment by Rachmat Witoelar was the government's bleakest yet of the effects of global warming on the Southeast Asian nation that is made up of some 18,000 islands, most of them unpopulated.

"It is very, very serious," he said at a media conference attended by Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. climate treaty secretariat.

Witoelar said respected scientific studies showed around 2,000 islands would be swallowed by 2030. He did not say whether the threatened islands were inhabited or not.

The environment minister also said rice shortages are forecast for next year because of wild weather blamed on climate change.

"It is feared there will be a lack of rice production next year because of the changes in the weather and because the farmers are not used to this," he said.

De Boer was in Jakarta to discuss a major U.N. climate change meeting later this year on the resort island of Bali. Environment ministers from 80 countries will meet to begin talks on what action the world must take after the first commitment period of the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012.
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