Oxfam GB in Indonesia In Action

Oxfam and Indonesian Civil Society Forum held an event on Friday evening (7/12). The purpose of the event was to share and discuss the human impact of climate change in Indonesia and to explore what the government, private sector, civil society and other stakeholders should do to ensure that the vulnerable groups can adapt to climate change.

The event is opened by David MacDonald, Country Program Manager of Oxfam Indonesia. During the opening speech, David shared his experience when he visited West Timor. He met up with local people and only to find out that the coping ability of local people to adapt with the climate change has stroked to the limit. People in West Timor are suffering and they will be more suffer if the government, private sector, civil society and other stakeholders do not take any action to eliminate their misery.

The discussion is opened by video testimonials on how climate change has various impacts for poor people in Indonesia.

Rizaldi Boer, one of the speaker of Bogor Institute of Agriculture during his presentation has confirmed that Indonesia is one of the country who badly hit by global warming and rice field in Indonesia greatly affected by short term climate variability and could be harmed significantly by long term climate change.  “Therefore, we need to have an adaptation strategy on rice agriculture. The Climate Field School is one of the strategies.”

Other speaker, Fabby Tumiwa, one of RI delegation also said that the impact of climate change on human security could be enormous.  Farah Sofa of Indonesian civil society forum stated that climate change is a product of human activities related to the fast industrial development. North countries are the one who benefiting from excessive economic.

The representative from private, Rudi Fajar, the CEO of PT Riau Andalan Pulp and Paper told that the private sectors are now have obligations to develop sustainability livelihood. The good business is do a good thing.

Meanwhile, Anand Krishna, the humanity and spirituality guru gave different perspective but really touched the humanity. He said the core of the problem is human greediness. The situation will get better if human stop abusing the world.