Blog Action Day 2009: Strengthen the Climate Change Adaptation in Indonesia

Adaptation refers to the actions taken by individuals, communities, or governments in response to climate change, to reduce the adverse impacts or to take advantage of opportunities offered by making appropriate adjustments.

Adaptation strategies have hardly been considered by many Southeast Asian countries in recently. The countries have already discussed the possibility of using institutions for risk sharing (disaster management) and risk transfer (insurance and derivatives) as measures to adapt.

They need the cost of adaptation and the funding to cope climate change problems. And, Indonesia have already some strategies to strengthen the climate change adaptation, to cope climate change problems, such as:

Adaptation in coastal areas

The problem of sea level rise could be handling with three general strategies:

- 'make protection', ie to plant mangrove trees along coastal areas as natural barrier;
- 'retreat or move to', ie. to live far from the beach, or
- 'life adjustment' ie: adaptation have done by switching to the sources of other income.

Adaptation to water supply

Indonesia have not been implemented an integrated water resource management. Provincial and district government office plan and implement the water resource management in various ways. It was often a conflict of management. We will need to implement water resource management more integrated - with the preservation of ecosystems along with repair dams and other infrastructure.

Adaptation to the health sector

To solve the climate change impacts are more difficult in the future, we need to strengthen basic health services. The community have to know what the climate change impact is, for example: the warmer climate will be enable to cause of the mosquitoes get into new areas, it would require a health surveillance system that more reliable to monitor the spread of diseases such as malaria and dengue fever.

Adaptation to urban areas

Indonesia need more reliable strategy to reduce the risk of climate change in all regions of this country, particularly in coastal and urban area where are flooding in periodically occurs.

There are some programs, such as, to develop an energy efficient buildings and the concept of transportation network in environment friendly ways.

Adaptation in disaster management

Climate change is increasingly pushing to concern the importance of management disaster. We have already known that it was more better doing the adaptation before the disaster occurred, rather than just responding after a disaster occurs, which must be achieved is to reduce risk and make preparations to deal with disaster. The best experiences of disaster management were learned and implemented by Indonesia Government, since the Tsunami disaster in 2004.

Indonesia is not included in the category of Annex I countries (developed countries}, according to the IPCC classification, it mean that Indonesia have not been obliged to reduce Carbon emissions, but it could be done in voluntary.

But according to the Indonesian Environmental Act No. 23 of 1997, the environment conservation must be done in line with sustainable development principle. So efforts to reduce the rate of carbon emission become important in order to conserve the environment.

Let's contributing or sharing our knowledge about the climate system to those in our social network or in the office. Understanding and awareness of climate change impact for others is still needed, because information of climate system could be used to reduce vulnerability or increase the resilience of communities and ecosystems from the climate change impact. Finally, good understanding of the climate system and its characteristics could be encouraging people to mitigate and adapt to climate change voluntary.