Indonesia faces threat by climate change on resources

JAKARTA, Oct. 14 (Xinhua) -- The world, especially archipelago and island countries, including Indonesia is facing challenges posed by climate change to maintain their resources such as food, water, energy and beach, an Indonesian president advisor said hereon Wednesday.

Emil Salim who is also the former minister of environment said in a seminar that climate change will affect resilience of animas and plants. On the other side, humans still need to live.

"So, scarcity of the resource due to lack of fresh water, dried food plants and infertile land will present us 'the world' shell'," Emil said.

Related to food security, he said, the climate change will infect planting pattern on food plants and scarcity of water.

"It will pose major challenge to food sustainability," Emil said.

Indonesia should use renewable energy to replace dirty energy resulted by coal use, he said.

"Indonesia has the world's second geothermal and huge hydropower energy. But, why we still depend on coal energy? The price distortion is the answer. It's expensive to develop clean energy. This is a big problem too," said Emil.

On water, he said that, food scarcity would prompt people to cut trees in order to gain land. "And, if they do it continuously, we will lose our forest that save water," he said.

The climate change will also pose danger to beach, particularly if people do nothing to protect it.

Emil said, the handling of climate change is not be only encouraged by developed countries because small and developing countries that have water territory are already aware of the danger posed by climate change.

"They know that climate change's effect, that would increase sea level, among others, would drown their countries," said Emil.

"We still have 20 years to increase our productivity to help environment," he added.