After being named three years ago as the world’s third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, Indonesia has published a report challenging the data.
The Second National Communication for the period 2000 to 2005, released by the Environment Ministry on Monday, is a report on greenhouse gases that must be submitted by parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The report says Indonesia emitted at most 1.38 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) a year during this period.
That is significantly lower than the previously accepted figure of 3.01 gigatons of CO2e in 2005 stated in a 2007 report published by local environmental consultancy Pelangi Energi Abadi Citra Enviro and funded by the World Bank and the UK Department for International Development.
The Peace report put Indonesia third worldwide after the United States, with 6 gigatons, and China, at 5.02 gigatons.
Sulistyowati, an assistant deputy for climate change impact control at the Environment Ministry, said the official SNC report should be the only reference for Indonesia’s CO2 emissions.
“This is the official document on greenhouse gas inventory for Indonesia,” she said.
“We will submit this to the UNFCCC as the national report, so this is the only document we will refer to when discussing emissions in the country. Previous reports no longer apply.”
The SNC report also gave much lower figures for the proportion of CO2 released from land use change and forestry, which includes peat fires.
The Peace report said an estimated 85 percent of the country’s emissions, or 2.56 gigatons, came from land use change and forestry, while the SNC put it at just 649 megatons in 2000 and 674 megatons in 2005.
It also said peat fires contributed only 172 megatons of CO2e in 2000 and 451 megatons in 2005.
These figures are also much lower than those from a 2009 report by the National Council on Climate Change, which said CO2 emissions from land use change and forestry in 2005 amounted to 1.88 gigatons, 55 percent of which came from peat fires.
The authors of the SNC report said these large discrepancies appeared to be due mainly to differences in estimates of land use change and forestry emissions.
Dadang Hilman, one of the report’s lead authors, said the methodologies used in the SNC report and previous reports were different and so the findings could not be compared.
He said estimates based on a count of forest fire hot spots in Kalimantan could skew the final figure higher than it really was, while extrapolating the results from a limited number of ground checks in Kalimantan to cover the whole of Indonesia could lead to an overestimate.
