Jakarta (The JakartaGlobe, November 23, 2009): Though both bodies were directly under the president, the National Council on Climate Change and the State Ministry for the Environment have come up with different data on national greenhouse gas emissions, an environmentalist said on Monday.
In August, the national council, also known as the DNPI, which was chaired by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, released a report on greenhouse gas emissions. The report said the destruction of peatland was responsible for 45 percent of the country’s emissions, while the forestry sector accounted for 35 percent.
But the Environment Ministry recently presented starkly different figures in its Second National Communication to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
For comparable periods, the DNPI’s report stated that total emissions were about 2,230 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, while the ministry’s SNC recorded just 1,416 tons. The DNOI said the forestry sector released 1,858 tons in 2005, but the SNC only listed 820 tons.
“As a citizen, I would be very confused because there are two reports coming out from two institutions that are under the president, but they present data with different methods, different approaches, which leads to different numbers,” said Emmy Hafild, head of the economic and environment sector at Kemitraan, a government reform advisory institution.
She said the SNC data also appeared more “defensive,” showing emissions figures not nearly as high as those from the DNPI.
Indonesia, which ratified the UNFCCC in 1994, is obligated to prepare and submit reports that include greenhouse gas inventories. The First National Communication was released in 1999, while the SNC was supposed to cover greenhouse gas emissions from 2000 to 2005.
Agus Purnomo, head of the DNPI secretariat, said the discrepancies in the reports came from the different methods used to tabulate the data.
He said the DNPI used 2005 as its baseline year, whereas the SNC used 2000.
He also said the DNPI collected average figures for emissions from peatland fires between 2000 and 2006, while the SNC only had data from 2000, which was the wettest year during that period.
The DNPI, Agus added, had also used a gross emissions approach compared to the ministry’s net emissions approach.
Masnellyarti Hilman, deputy for environmental damage control at the Environment Ministry, said the ministry and the DNPI had already met to coordinate their data.
“Basically, we want to have the same data,” she said, although adding that the ministry’s data collection had already been reviewed by an intergovernmental scientific body.
“The SNC followed methods that have been internationally acknowledged by the UNFCCC.”
Masnellyarti also said the DNPI report was released because the SNC was still not ready in August.
Now that it has been released, she said, the climate change council should use the SNC because it represented the government’s official data.
