MOSCOW, February 15 (RIA Novosti) - A RIA Novosti interview with the president of the United Nations climate change conference and the Indonesian environment minister, Rachmat Witoelar, on the third anniversary of the coming into force of the Kyoto Protocol.
Question: What are the results of the Kyoto Protocol in the three years since it came into force [on Feb 16, 2004]?
Answer: I would say we have seen high hopes and high opportunities for the world to work together. We have not had major results, although we have some results - with CDM (Clean Development Mechanism), with capacity building, but nothing compared to what was expected when the Kyoto Protocol was established in 1997.
So, we are trying to proceed as quickly as possible. We are positive, but we have not had many results yet.
Q: What was achieved at the Bali UNCC Conference you presided over in December last year?
A: The results were very much anticipated beforehand. There were major issues that we would have liked to settle. And it is very good that the major building blocks were settled upon. We had agreed to talk about that, to pursue that, and that came with a world consensus in terms of understanding its importance, like it was witnessed in the agreement on the use of detectors.
Russia has been very helpful in all these talks, because you were the one who made this happen, because for the Kyoto Protocol to be implemented that needed the full backing that you gave in 2004.
As for the results, we have 25 products and in general these are what they call the Bali Road Map, and we have long term arrangements that are the Bali Action Plan. We are going to give further details in several meetings, starting from next month, and most of them will be laid out in Poznan and Copenhagen.
So, Bali has given us the foundation to move further ahead.
Q: Actually, that was my third question: what exactly can be done with less than a year remaining before the next conference?
A: We can elaborate on the decisions that have been taken and that elaboration is certainly essential to the success of the Kyoto Protocol as it was intended. So, in four meetings in the year until Poznan we will delineate, we will elaborate, we will put down how many, and who, and what, and how. We hope to achieve that.
Q: So the Bali Roadmap will become a detailed path?
A: We hope for that. But with this road map we have no exact direction, as we still have some alternatives, right?
I think that all of this will be concluded in 2012. We have to be patient, because we have a lot of participants who have to accommodate to that, to form a consensus. If there is no consensus like we have in big multilateral bodies, we will have decisions that are being implemented so slowly...
We have to make peace between the European Union, and the Americans, and the Russians, and the Chinese, and the G-77 at large, so we look for common denominators. We are convinced that without that consensus there won't be anything, and that would be a useless situation for everybody.
Q: Were the latest Jakarta floods, during which for the second time in two months thousands of passengers were unable to get to the international airport or out of it, one of the signs of global warming or they were a result of mistakes in city planning?
A: I would be very careful in answering this, because it is also a scientific question. But as far as our studies go, I would say that it was, maybe, 80% due to land mismanagement, to our - and in particular the province government's - mistakes in city planning, and 15% due to the increase in environmental challenges.
Q: The last question is also for you in your capacity as minister. It is obvious that Indonesia has a fantastic potential in both geothermal and tidal energy. What is being done by its government in these areas?
A: One is totally realized, we are in a full agreement regarding the geothermal potential, that we have to develop it, although it has being ignored during the past decades because of technical/ technological as well as financial constraints.
We are promoting that as a second or third alternative for fossil fuel use, but the tidal energy potential is not very much realized, it is only an experiment in Bali Strait and so on. We already have the strategic energy mix for Indonesia created by the Ministry of Energy, starting from day one, a year ago, for fossil fuel to be so much, for non-fossil, solar. This is included in the National Action Plan that we have created.
By Mikhail Tsyganov in Jakarta
