Indonesia's environmental problem is considered large. From illegal logging that causing the destruction of our rain forest, poor environmental law enforcement, floods, landslides, toxic garbage, air pollution, high level of emission from industry and motor vehicles, and the corrupting quality of our water supplies. There are several indicators that can be used to measure how big exactly our problem is.
Environmental Performance Index
There are several environmental indicators we can use to see how serious our problem is. n this post, I am using EPI (Environmental Performance Index) as a barometer. EPI is an index to environmental performance of countries around the globe, produced by Yale University.
EPI is not without flaws. The weighting is considered bias to more advanced and wealthy countries. EPI has several categories. For in stance, environmental health was given a 50% weight while climate change only 25%.
Being more well equipped (with finance and technology) the more advanced countries thus have more capacity in preventing environmental pollution to their nation’s health compared to developing or even under developed countries. On the other side, advanced countries have the largest portion of energy consumption and therefore contribute the highest to global climate shifting. This aspect was given a smaller weighting. There are several other reasons why the EPI is considered bias.
Though considered bias, at least it’s a start and basic to see whether a country’s policies are environmental friendly, especially to those that have yet established similar indicators, while waiting for a far better and improved index than EPI.
According to EPI, two largest problems (amongst many) we are facing right now is air pollution and water supply quality.
Air Pollution
Motor vehicle is the largest contributor of air pollution in Indonesia. Many of these vehicles are motorcycles or scooters, which lack the catalytic converters required for cleaner emissions. Moreover, almost no motor vehicles in Indonesia use unleaded gasoline.
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Jakarta's air remains among the dirtiest in the world. Forest fires also contribute to Indonesian air pollution. Often these fires result from illegal logging of Indonesia's rain forests. Indonesia's industrial sector, which contains chemical, petroleum, coal, plastic and rubber products, and food industries, also is a significant polluter. Unfortunately, there is limited quantitative data on their overall impact.
Water Supply
Water supply and sanitation in Indonesia is characterized by poor levels of access and service quality. Over 100 million people lack access to safe water and more than 70 percent of the country’s 220 million population relies on water obtained from potentially contaminated source. With only 2% access to sewerage in urban areas is one of the lowest in the world among middle-income countries. Pollution is widespread on Bali and Java. Women in Jakarta reportedly spending US$ 11 per month on boiling water, implying a significant burden for the poor (ADB).
There is another effective yet simple indicator to see how big our problem is. Just google Indonesia and environment in the same sentence and you will be amazed that problems are 90% of the search result. I also conduct some searching in "environmental graffiti" and find a similar match. In the environmental department, Indonesia is mainly famous of its problems and poor environment quality.
We CAN change those results into a more positive ones. How can we change that?!
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