Climate change and Indonesia: in honour of Panglaykim

Abstract

This paper examines Indonesia's vulnerability to climate change, and her position in the global climate change mitigation effort as a significant emitter with large potential for reducing emissions from forestry. It highlights the scope for Australia and Indonesia—both large emitters, one a developed country and potential buyer of emissions permits, the other a developing country and potential seller of per-mits—to play complementary roles in the global effort. The discussion outlines ways in which the two countries can cooperate with each other and with regional neighbours in mitigation initiatives and climate change adaptation. It suggests that their efforts could serve as a model for cooperation between developed and developing countries. The paper notes that the current global financial crisis is a short-term problem, while climate change has its effects over the long term. The recessionary effect of the financial crisis is not a good reason for delaying climate change mitigation efforts by Indonesia and other countries.

Notes

¹‘Australia's low pollution future: launch of Australian government's White Paper on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme’, Speech by the Hon. Kevin Rudd, MP, Prime Minister of Australia, to the National Press Club, Canberra, 15 December 2008, viewed 20 December 2008 at <http://www.pm.gov.au/media/Speech/2008/speech_0699.cfm>.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ross Garnaut∗

∗ This is an edited version of the 20th Panglaykim Memorial Lecture, delivered at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Jakarta on 17 October 2008, and published in the CSIS journal The Indonesian Quarterly 36 (3–4), December 2008. Permission to publish this version in BIES is gratefully acknowledged. The author was commissioned by the Australian government to conduct its national climate change review. Panglaykim began his professional life as a member of that distinguished group of Indonesians who received graduate education at the University of California at Berkeley in the Old Order years under Soekarno. Subsequent periods at Singapore and Nanyang Universities and the Australian National University (ANU) were all preparatory to the 14 years with his main base at CSIS in Jakarta, from 1972 until his death in 1986. Pang (as we knew him) joined the ANU in a research position when I was a student. I used his work, especially that on state trading companies in Indonesia, when I was studying the foreign trade of the Southeast Asian countries for my PhD thesis in the late 1960s. He was an important early member of ANU's Indonesia Project. He helped to build the nascent Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, and contributed substantially to several of the first surveys of recent developments in the Indonesian economy. The links that he pioneered between ANU and CSIS have played a vital role in building the strong interaction between economists in Indonesia and Australia that has been of such great value to us both