Earth Equity News

Indonesia Walks a 'Tricky' Path Toward Growth and Sustainability. By Jessica Leber, ClimateWire, March 22, 2010. "Four decades of aggressive development have stripped Indonesia's forests nearly half bare since the time when a young Barack Obama lived there from 1967 to 1971. In June, the U.S. president plans to revisit his childhood home as he aims to forge closer ties with the emerging but often overlooked Asia-Pacific power. Climate change will be a top agenda item in developing a new U.S.-Indonesia bilateral partnership, administration officials said in a briefing last week. The visit comes as Indonesia's government tries for a greater voice in U.N. climate talks and has pledged to cut its greenhouse gas output 26% over the next decade. It says it will raise that target to 41% if enough foreign aid comes under a climate deal. But the world's fourth most populated nation also faces intense pressure to maintain a 6% growth rate in its gross domestic product to employ its expanding workforce... Still, some 80% of Indonesia's greenhouse gas output comes straight from its landscape, as loggers and paper companies clear natural forests and grow plantations, miners cut through forests with roads, and palm oil producers drain carbon-rich peatlands and clear them with fires that can burn out of control."