Dengan Hormat,

Sedari kecil saya sudah mengenal dan menggunakan toilet atau yang sering disebut sebagai kakus. Tentu saja saya tidak ingat bagaimana cara orangtua mengajarkan saya untuk menggunakan kloset jongkok, tapi saya masih ingat saat pertama kali menggunakan kloset duduk. Perubahan kebiasaan itu tidak bisa dilakukan hanya dengan sekali atau dua kali menggunakan kloset duduk. Jadi di tahap awal penggunaan kloset duduk, di saat ‘darurat’ saya akan berlari ke kamar mandi lain yang masih menggunakan kloset jongkok atau akan menggunakan kloset duduk dengan posisi jongkok . Tapi setelah berkali-kali menggunakan kloset duduk, saya akhirnya terbiasa menggunakan kloset duduk dan sama nyamannya dengan menggunakan kloset jongkok. Ringkasnya, bagi saya hanya dua alternatif itu yang bisa digunakan untuk buang hajat dan tidak pernah terpikirkan sekalipun untuk menggunakan fasilitas lainnya.

Tapi siapa nyana, bertahun-tahun setelah kejadian di atas, saya justru menemukan kenyataan yang benar-benar di luar pengetahuan saya: bahwa masih ada masyarakat yang buang hajat di tempat terbuka (open defecation). Rasanya tidak dapat dipercaya, di tengah hiruk pikuk kemajuan negara ini, ternyata masih banyak warga negara ini yang belum tersentuh kemewahan dalam hal sanitasi. Sanitasi yang dimaksud tentunya bukan melulu terkait dengan toilet saja, tapi juga pengelolaan sampah, limbah cair, dan juga drainase.

Dan kawasan yang kumuh dan miskin (kumis) merupakan kawasan dengan kondisi sanitasi yang demikian, tidak peduli apakah kawasan ini berlokasi di tengah kota, pinggiran kota, atau bahkan di perdesaan. Banyak hal yang dapat menyebabkan perilaku sanitasi yang demikian, salah satunya adalah masih kurangnya kesadaran terhadap perilaku hidup sehat dan juga ketidakmampuan untuk membangun fasilitas sanitasi. Berbeda halnya dengan penyediaan air minum yang menjadi salah satu prioritas pembangunan, sanitasi seringkali dianggap sebagai urusan masing-masing warga negara. Sementara ketidaktahuan dan ketidakpedulian akan perilaku hidup sehat justru menyebabkan kondisi sanitasi yang buruk di berbagai tempat.

Beberapa lokasi kumis sebenarnya sudah terbantu dengan adanya toilet umum atau lebih dikenal sebagai MCK. Namun di beberapa tempat, penggunaan MCK ternyata belum bisa dimanfaatkan oleh semua orang. Hal ini disebabkan karena toilet dan pemandian umum tersebut dirancang secara komunal tanpa memberikan ruang pribadi bagi penggunanya. Misalnya untuk toilet, hanya dipisahkan oleh dinding setinggi 70 cm saja antara satu dengan lainnya, jadi buang hajat bisa disambi mengobrol dengan tetangga sebelah . Sudah dapat diduga, fasilitas tersebut hanya bisa dimanfaatkan oleh pria, sedangkan wanita cenderung dilarang menggunakannya. Akibatnya, para kaum wanita justru melakukan buang hajat di tempat terbuka, tentunya tanpa sepengetahuan orang lain.

Dapat disimpulkan, masih banyak pekerjaan rumah yang perlu dilakukan dalam hal sanitasi. Uraian mengenai toilet di atas hanyalah sebagian dari permasalahan sanitasi di negara ini. Saat ini perhatian akan pengelolaan sampah sudah mendapat porsi yang besar seperti yang terlihat pada pemberitaan di media masa. Namun alangkah indahnya kalau semua aspek sanitasi telah dapat dinikmati oleh semua orang, baik pria, wanita, anak-anak yang berada di perkotaaan, pinngiran, dan perdesaan. Selamat tahun sanitasi!

Later, I got a chance to pursue my education to other country in Europe, it is NL. I was so happy and almost never slept during the long hours of flight. I arrived in the airport early in the morning at local time, and directly continued the trip to the final destination, to the city where I spent my time for study. We arrived right before lunch, and after taking a rest for a while, my new friends and I decided to go to a supermarket for groceries. We bought many things even though we thought all those groceries were far more expensive than in our own country. We can’t stop ourselves calibrating the euro numbers into rupiah. However, after paying all those things, the cashier did not give us any plastic bag to store our groceries, he just piled it up on his desk and waited for us to take all of them away. I forgot how we can manage that situation but somehow someone told us to buy a plastic bag if we did not have anything to carry our groceries. We followed the instruction even though we are still questioning each other about what was happened at that time. Soon after, we realized that most of supermarkets –except asian stores/supermarkets- in the country do not provide the plastic bags for free, which is part of a policy to reduce the use of plastic bag for the environmental reason. Everybody is suggested to bring along their own bag or plastic bag when they are shopping in a supermarket, otherwise they should spend 0.25E for a plastic bag or 0.50E up to 1E for a better quality of bag that can be used frequently. And spending at least 0.25E every time you buy groceries is not something wise, right? So, like it or not, we do not have other choice than follow the system there.

Frankly, this new obligatory habit was not something enjoyable for me at the first time. Sometimes it pissed me off every time I forgot to bring my shopping bag or spare some space in my bag for groceries I bought. However, by the time, I get used to it. Actually this new habit drive me plans when to shop my groceries and this is good considering I am a shopping freak. Speaking about shopping freak, fortunately, they gave me plastic bags for clothes and stationeries I bought in the country, pffffffuih. By the way, there is a trend in the country regarding this shopping bag. I see so many people, women or men, children or elderly, who bring along a bag equipped with a trolley at the bottom (What do you call this thing?). You can see them everywhere. Most people bring this thing along with them when they are shopping. The flat floor enables their mobility with their bags. Isn’t interesting?

During my stay in the country, I learned that not all of the wastes go to the disposal site. It is not obligatory to separate our garbage at home, but some people or maybe most of the citizens there support recycling activity. They keep glass, papers, and certain plastic bottles and exchange them with shopping vouchers in several machines available in a supermarket or store them to collectors of glass and papers that usually located around the neighborhood. This recycling activity is something amazing for me, since I never wonder how to do this in my home country. The neighboring country, Germany, has obliged all residents to separate their waste into three types, so every house has at least three garbage bins. Japan has more complicated waste separation, according to him, there are seven types of wastes to separate and each kind of waste was collected at different days.

Time flies by, I finished my education there and went back to my home country. I spent a few months for holiday before getting back to a ‘real’ world. I stayed in Bandung during the time and enjoyed my shopping activity without worrying about my shopping bag. It was easy for me to adjust to my old habit. I moved to another city for starting a new job and slowly but sure I adapted with my new environment. My new job is quite different than the first job I had in Bandung before, but it fits with my latest educational background. However, I have to learn so many things since the job requires fieldwork in almost daily basis, something I did not experience in my previous job. Our job is to help the community make a better quality of environment while also alleviate the poverty in their neighborhood. Our program is different than the preceding program by other organizations before us, we do not offer any reward to the community, and this is not an easy task to make them attracted to take part in our program.

After a lot of effort to get them joined in the program and several community meetings, we came up with the idea to solve their problem on solid waste first, and put aside the other things for later. We proceed their expectation with many activities to get a clear picture on solid waste issue in the neighborhood and how to solve it. This whole thing is a new experience for me and I learn so many things. I was re-introduced with something called composting, which is used to reduce the organic wastes. Most solid wastes in Indonesia consist of 70-80% of organic waste, imagine how much you can reduce if you can compost all of the organic waste. I also get a new knowledge on plastic collection and recycling, even there is an established business on this thing. I just realized that scavengers play the main role in the collection and recycling of plastics in this country. Those plastics they collected are sold to a place called pooler or a middleman (lapak), usually they pile it up until they get certain amount or numbers of plastic required by the pooler. There are many kind of plastics stored in the pooler, from a plastic bag used to wrap your groceries (keresek) to plastic bottles. These plastics are sold to a higher level of pooler and at the end are recycled into plastic bags or plastic seeds. It’s a marvelous unknown cycle for me back then. And even though I have ever visited a shop that sells recycled products in NL, I never thought that my own country produce those things too. I should admit that the idea of producing the recycled products was not from an Indonesian, but knowing that people in my country is producing recycled products make me proud. They took environmental reasons and creative business seriously. This has given me a new enlightenment: our plastic waste is not only a waste.

Meanwhile, my shopping activity becomes almost out of control. I shop everyweek, from groceries to clothes. It seems that I never lack of idea on things to buy. It gives me two large size of plastic bags contains plastic bags in my room. I tried to ‘spend’ the plastic bags by disposing my garbage once or twice a day, but never reduce the amount of the plastic bags piled. I feel guilty if I just throw them out without reusing them again. Then, I start to bring along my shopping bag for my groceries and expect those piles reduced. Once in a while I forgot to bring my shopping bag, but fortunately I do not need to buy the plastic bag. I am happy when I get used to my old habit again. However, I still ‘produce’ plastic bags from shopping other things, I am thinking about using other shopping bag for those things too. Later on, I realized that a few stores in the city have stopped providing plastic bags for the shoppers. They give us a better quality of bags instead and we can use it for shopping other things too. Now I am very happy that there are many more people realize the importance of not using the plastic bags. It is not only the shoppers, but also the store managers realize it now. I hope people can replace the plastic bag with the biodegradable plastic bags, which can reduce the numbers of plastic bags remain indegradable. From now on, lets say: no plastic bag, please . Now it’s doable, believe me.

The Earth offers a combination of beautiful pictures, scientific knowledge, best narration, excellent cinematography, and committed production team. I can also add a passionate team in making this movie, coz they spent 5 years to finish the movie and a significant amount of money to produce it. As a result, the movie is able to give a luxury of breathtaking pictures and narration since at the very beginning. Every word is rich with knowledge, but I can hear those poetic words along the way. The narration has the same strength with the scenario. The director enables to give a break from the rich information given in the movie by stealing the time for jokes based on animal behaviors. The other time, I can feel the pain caused by the suffering of the animals that fail to meet their needs. Certainly, I can feel the joy of having their mission accomplished.

Since this movie is highly related to climate change then I should say I am still learning about climate change and everything related with this issue. I try not to limit my attention only based on competence, even though certain scientific knowledge might not familiar to me. Moreover, I am fully support the adaptation and mitigation related to climate change. I might not take in part in any visible effort to promote the awareness on climate change, but at least it can be mainstreamed in conducting my work.

Ironically, watching this movie brought me another thought about climate change and environment. The preliminary narration about the ice age and the changes happened during the time took me to a question about the priority related to climate change. Now I try to digest the question she told to me a few months ago, whether the human or the environment is more important. I think I finally know the direction she tried to show me last time. It’s not about being ignorance to climate change, but it’s about the meaning of the environment for the people.

Jump to another topic, when I learned the first time about disaster, I was introduced with several terminologies, such as vulnerability, hazard, and disaster. Those words are interrelated. Theoretically, disaster is:

And at the time, I just knew that what we -the human- called as disaster only happened when the hazard in the vulnerable spot become danger and caused human victims. E.g landslide, when it happened in residential area or any ‘human area’ and cost human victims, it will be called as disaster, but when it happened at far away place than human area and caused no victim, it will only be called as natural movement/phenomenon. And this same phenomenon was also happened thousand years ago at ice age. The nature always finds its way to achieve the balance every time a change happened to its body. And such phenomenon also involves climate change in the process, which caused the ice melting and the high temperature affected all living things on the earth. As a result, not all of those living things survive during the adaptation process. Several changes happened to the physical appearance and their body structure as a result of their evolution to the new environmental condition. This makes me believe that any changes could still generate survivors as long as they are adapting.

So, I can see that our environment is never be the same, it is changing gradually or even extremely and we are adapting with them. I am not saying that mitigating climate change is not important, but still, we cannot expect the same physical environment for the next generation. If only we could preserve everything we had at the ice age, would it be the same environment like we have now?

Image is taken from here

The quote on disaster is taken from my lecturer’s presentation

]]> http://qqdamai.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/the-earth/feed/ 0 qqdamai http://qqdamai.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/perubahan-iklim-dalam-konteks-kebencanaan-di-indonesia/ http://qqdamai.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/perubahan-iklim-dalam-konteks-kebencanaan-di-indonesia/#comments Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:15:56 +0000 qqdamai http://qqdamai.wordpress.com/?p=3 ]]> Sejak munculnya film dokumenter yang diprakarsai oleh Al Gore, The Inconvenient Truth, isu mengenai perubahan iklim semakin mendapat perhatian dunia. Keberadaan IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) yang merupakan bagian dari badan dunia yang melakukan penelitian dan perumusan dokumen kebijakan terkait perubahan iklim pun menjadi acuan bagi warga dunia. Indonesia sendiri juga menjadi bagian dari rangkaian peristiwa penting terkait perubahan iklim, yaitu dengan menjadi tuan rumah penyelenggaraan the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (UNFCCC) pada tanggal 1-14 Desember 2007 yang lalu di Nusa Dua, Bali. Sebelum penyelenggaraan konferensi ini, sejak awal tahun 2007 telah banyak kegiatan seminar dan diskusi yang digelar oleh LSM-LSM maupun lembaga-lembaga pemerintah Indonesia sendiri untuk meningkatkan pemahaman dan merumuskan aksi yang tepat terkait perubahan iklim. Salah satu produk yang dihasilkan dari kegiatan-kegiatan tersebut adalah Rencana Aksi Nasional dalam Menghadapi Perubahan Iklim (RAN-PI) yang saat ini masih dalam tahap legalisasi.

Perumusan RAN-PI ini tentunya menunjukkan pemahaman dan sikap negara ini dalam menghadapi perubahan iklim. Perubahan iklim yang dimaksud di sini merupakan dampak dari pemanasan global yang berbentuk perubahan-perubahan yang signifikan dalam sistem fisik dan biologis. Perubahan-perubahan tersebut antara lain peningkatan intensitas badai tropis, perubahan pola presipitasi, salinitas air laut, perubahan pola angin, masa reproduksi hewan dan tanaman, distribusi spesies dan ukuran populasi, frekuensi serangan hama dan wabah penyakit, serta mempengaruhi ekosistem yang terdapat di daerah dengan garis lintang yang tinggi, lokasi yang tinggi, serta ekosistem-ekosistem pantai (KLH, 2007). Perubahan-perubahan ini secara gradual akan mengakibatkan dampak yang nyata khususnya bagi negara-negara kepulauan dan negara bergaris pantai yang panjang, antara lain berupa kenaikan muka air laut dan gelombang tinggi.

Dalam menyikapi perubahan iklim ini, telah dirumuskan dua konsep penting terkait perubahan iklim, yaitu perlunya tindakan adaptasi dalam menghadapi perubahan iklim dan pentingnya mitigasi terhadap perubahan iklim. Seperti yang dikutip dari RAN-PI, adaptasi didefinisikan sebagai tindakan penyesuaian sistem alam dan sosial untuk menghadapi dampak negatif dari perubahan iklim. Akan tetapi, tindakan adaptasi ini tidak akan efektif jika laju perubahan iklim melebihi kemampuan adaptasi. Dengan demikian, juga perlu dilakukan tindakan mitigasi[1], yaitu upaya mengurangi sumber maupun penyerap gas rumah kaca.

Terlepas dari kedua konsep tersebut, keberadaan perubahan iklim juga memberikan perspektif berbeda dalam kaitannya dengan dampak yang diakibatkan. Kenaikan muka air laut, gelombang tinggi, perubahan pola hujan dan kemarau yang mengancam produktivitas panen petani, perubahan salinitas air laut yang mempengaruhi populasi ikan tangkapan nelayan merupakan sedikit dari dampak perubahan iklim yang menimbulkan kerentanan dan merugikan masyarakat terkait. Dampaknya yang besar dan merugikan warga dunia ini membuatnya layak dikategorikan sebagai bencana.

Bencana akibat perubahan iklim (bencana klimatologi) menunjukkan ciri yang berbeda dibandingkan dengan bencana geologi seperti gempa, tsunami, dan sebagainya. Bencana yang dipahami secara umum adalah bersifat mendadak dan bervariasi dari yang dapat hingga yang tidak dapat diprediksi sehingga membutuhkan tanggap darurat saat terjadi bencana. Sementara bencana klimatologi terjadi secara perlahan (gradual) dalam jangka yang relatif panjang. Wilayah pantai dan pulau-pulau kecil merupakan yang lebih dulu terkena dampak perubahan iklim dibandingkan wilayah-wilayah lainnya. Walaupun demikian, beberapa perwujudan dari bencana klimatologi merupakan bencana yang telah dikenal sebelumnya, antara lain banjir, longsor, dan kebakaran lahan gambut. Bencana klimatologi juga memberikan ancaman yang sama dengan bencana lainnya terhadap masyarakat miskin, khususnya yang berada di wilayah pantai dan pulau kecil.

Karakteristik bencana yang berbeda ini tentunya menuntut tindakan yang berbeda untuk mengurangi kerugian akibat dampak perubahan iklim. Konsep adaptasi merupakan salah satu yang perlu diarusutamakan dalam perencanaan jangka panjang di tingkat nasional hingga individu. Pola curah hujan yang menjadi lebih sering dengan durasi yang lebih panjang dan diikuti dengan kemarau panjang menuntut adanya inovasi dalam teknologi pangan untuk menjamin persediaan makanan bagi rakyat. Perubahan pola ini juga dapat mengakibatkan banjir. Sementara kenaikan muka air laut di kawasan pesisir dapat mengancam sumber air baku di sungai-sungai dan menuntut adanya alternatif penyediaan air maupun teknologinya. Kawasan perkotaan yang memiliki kebutuhan air bersih yang besar pun tidak luput dari dampak perubahan iklim sehingga membutuhkan strategi adaptasi yang terintegrasi dengan strategi pembangunan terutama dalam penataan ruang. Khusus untuk pulau-pulau kecil, Small Island Development States (SIDS) tentunya memiliki perhatian yang besar agar dapat beradaptasi terhadap perubahan iklim. Dengan demikian, pengarusutamaan adaptasi perubahan iklim menjadi hal penting dalam semua program pembangunan perkotaan, pulau-pulau kecil, dan kawasan pesisir Indonesia.

Referensi

KLH, Kementerian Lingkungan Hidup -. 2007. Draft Rencana Aksi Nasional dalam Menghadapi Perubahan Iklim