Map Of Indonesia Only
Namuncura Mckoy
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Always carry toilet paper. That was the best advice I received before leaving on a five month trip to Australia and Southeast Asia. As with all important lessons, I was destined to find out the hard way.
Popular myth, fostered by Hollywood no doubt, suggests that the police and the Mafia always determine the exits from a room before they sit down. While in Asia, I developed the habit of determining the location of the toilet before I made myself comfortable. And since the use of toilet paper is a Western custom (Southeast Asians use water), I always carried my own.
The site of my hard-learned lesson was Lake Toba, in northern Sumatra, in Indonesia. My friend and I were staying on Samosir Island in a village called Tuk Tuk. The island was beautiful. At that time, there was no electricity, the accommodations were spartan, the food delicious and the tourists tended toward the bohemian.
Suddenly, I realized that we were not going to make it to the springs in time for me to take care of an urgent bodily need. Fortunately, there was a toilet onboard or rather a small cubicle with a hole leading toward the hull. However, to my consternation, I discovered that for the first time I was not carrying toilet paper. And, the cubicle did not even have the customary bucket of water and ladle. I rummaged through my bag in a panic. The only serviceable item I found was my English-Indonesian dictionary. I made a quick decision-I was unlikely to need the words beginning with X, Y, or Z-and ripped those pages out of the book. Problem solved!
Women should use the namaste greeting as an alternative when greeting Hindu men. This involves putting the hands together at chest level, as in prayer, and bowing slightly.
(Source: Raise Your Cultural IQ, Louisa Nedcov)
It is common to see people of the same sex holding hands or with arms around each other while walking in public. This is regarded as a sign of friendship. (Source: Raise Your Cultural IQ, Louisa Nedcov)
Be open to the possibility of exciting experiences from unlikely sources. On several occasions, I asked people for directions and ended up being welcomed into their homes and shown places I would have not seen otherwise.
That overlap has led some analysts to blame the United States for deforestation in Indonesia and Malaysia, suggesting that the expansion in palm oil production is driven by biofuel production in U.S. But a Purdue University study shows that only a scant fraction of the deforestation in those countries can be pinned on U.S. biofuel production and policy.
As the United States uses soybeans and corn to produce biofuels, one could expect less soybeans and corn will remain for other uses, including exports. That could generate some land use changes and deforestation across the world including Malaysia and Indonesia, which clear natural land to plant palm oil trees and other commodities.
PHOTO: A Purdue University analysis shows that U.S. biofuel production and policy may account for only a negligible portion of the land cleared for increased palm oil production since the 1990s. (Photo courtesy mongabay.com). A publication quality photo is available at -deforestation.jpg.
It has been argued that the US biofuel policy is responsible for the land use changes in Malaysia and Indonesia (M&I). In this paper, following a short literature review that highlights the relevant topics and issues, we develop analytical and numerical analyses to evaluate the extent to which production of biofuels in the US alters land use in M&I. The analytical analyses make it clear that market-mediated responses may generate some land use change in M&I due to biofuel production in the US. These analyses highlight the role of substitution among vegetable oils in linking these economies in markets for vegetable oils. To numerically quantify these effects, we modified and used a well-known Computable General Equilibrium model (CGE), GTAP-BIO. We conducted some sensitivity tests as well.
According to the simulation results obtained from two base case scenarios for corn ethanol and soy biodiesel, we find that producing 15 BGs of corn ethanol and 2 BGs gallons of soy biodiesel together could potentially increase area of cropland in M&I by 59.6 thousand hectares. That is less than 0.5% of the cropland expansion in M&I for the time period of 2000-2016, when biofuel production increased in the US. The original GTAP-BIO model parameters including the regional substitution rates among vegetable oils were used for the base case scenarios. The estimated Induced Land Use Change (ILUC) emissions values for corn ethanol and soy biodiesel are about 12.3 g CO2e MJ-1, 17.5 g CO2e MJ-1 for the base case scenarios, respectively. The share of M&I in the estimated ILUC emissions value for corn ethanol is 10.9%. The corresponding share for soy biodiesel is much higher, 78%. The estimated ILUC emissions value for soy biodiesel is sensitive with respect to the changes in the regional rates of substitution elasticity among vegetable oils. That is not the case for corn ethanol.
When we replaced the original substitution elasticities of the base case, which are very large (i.e. 5 or 10) for many regions, with a small and uniform rate of substitution (i.e. 0.5) across the world, the ILUC emissions value for soy biodiesel drops from 17.5 g CO2e MJ-1 to 10.16 g CO2e MJ-1. When we applied larger substitution elasticities among vegetable oils, the estimated ILUC emissions value for soy biodiesel converged towards the base case results. This suggests that, other factors being equal, the base case substitution elasticities provide the largest possible ILUC emissions value for soy biodiesel.
Finally, our analyses clearly indicate that those analyses that limit their modeling framework to only palm and soy oil and ignore other types of vegetable oils and fats provide misleading information and exaggerate about the land use implications of the US biofuels for M&I.
1) Production of biofuels in the US generates some land use effects in M&I due to market-mediated responses, in particular through the links between markets for vegetable oils. These effects are minor compared to the magnitude of land use change in M&I. However, because of the high carbon intensity of the peatland the emissions fraction of M&I is larger, in particular for soy biodiesel.
2) The GTAP-BIO model implemented a set of regional substitution elasticities among vegetable oils that, other factors being equal, provides the largest possible ILUC emissions value for soy biodiesel.
3) With a larger substitution elasticity among all types of vegetable oils and animal fats in the US, less land use changes occur in M&I. That is due to the fact that a larger substitution elasticity among vegetable oils in the US, diverts a larger portion of the additional demand for soy oil to non-palm vegetable oils and animal fats that are produced either in the US or regions other than M&I.
4) Those analyses that limit their modeling framework to only palm and soy oils and ignore other types of vegetable oils and fats provide misleading information and exaggerate about the land use implications of the US biofuels for M&I.
"In the late 2000s, large-scale plantations were responsible for more than half of Indonesia's loss of primary natural forests," said Kemen G. Austin, a 2018 doctoral graduate of Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, who led the study. "This trend peaked from 2008 to 2010, when an average of 600,000 hectares of forest was lost annually -- 57 percent of it driven by the expansion of these massive farms."
"From 2014 to 2016, an average of more than 800,000 hectares of primary forest was lost annually, but large-scale plantations accounted for only 25 percent of it," Austin said. "So although the overall rate of deforestation grew, other causes were responsible for most of it."
Small-scale farming, which has largely been overshadowed by plantation-scale agriculture as a driver of deforestation, was also found to play a bigger role, accounting for about one-quarter of all forest loss. This suggests the importance of designing forest management interventions that take the values and requirements of small-holder farmers into account too, said Austin, who is now a senior policy analyst at RTI International.
"The takeaway message for policymakers and conservationists is that the causes of forest loss in Indonesia are much more varied than we previously thought. They change from place to place and over time," Austin said. "Even though oil palm is the first thing that pops into most people's head when they think about deforestation in Indonesia, it's not the only cause, and we need to adjust our policies and practices to account for that."
Their study is the first to document the changing causes of deforestation occurring in Indonesia at the national scale and at the local level on each of the country's major developed islands. Some global studies previously have included nationwide data from Indonesia, Austin noted, but not at such a fine scale.
"Using 15 years of high-spatial-resolution Google Earth imagery and newly available global datasets on forest loss let us zero in on the causes of deforestation at each location and see how they vary from place to place and over time," Austin said. "For instance, logging is still driving deforestation on the island of Papua, but on Sumatra and Kalimantan, it's the oil palm industry and El Nio-driven fires that are the primary drivers."
Indonesia has experienced one of the highest rates of primary natural forest loss in the tropics in recent years. The loss of these forests -- which absorb and store vast amounts of climate-warming carbon dioxide, provide habitat for thousands of species, and help control erosion and flooding -- has become a cause of global environmental concern.
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