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Global warming and rising sea levels could rob millions of peasant farmers
in Southeast Asia of their land, leading to widespread unemployment and
poverty. The regional economy may also suffer multimillion-pound losses
as crop yields decrease, and rising sea levels destroy coastal fisheries
and threaten tourist resorts.

These are some of the dire events predicted by the first study into
the potential socioeconomic effects of climate change on Indonesia, Malaysia
and Thailand. Launched earlier this month in Bangkok, the £300 000
UN-backed study was set up to make the countries more aware of the issues
raised by climatic change and help them adopt sound policies to combat global
warming.

The report should also strengthen the three countries’ negotiating positions
at next week’s preparatory meeting in New York for the UN Conference on
Environment and Development – the Earth Summit. This is the last of the
‘PrepComs’ before the summit begins in June, and is due to discuss the climate
convention, an international plan for halting global warming. However, hopes
have faded that the convention will be ready for signing by June. There
is still a yawning chasm between how developing and developed countries
view responsibility for global warming and its solutions. Many developing
countries have nothing like the scientific wherewithal to judge the costs
of rising temperature and its remedies.

The report reveals that widescale human suffering is a real possibility
as a result of climate change, says Martin Parry, editor of the report,
and director of the University of Oxford’s recently established Environmental
Change Unit. The report is the first produced by the Oxford unit, and the
first such research to involve teams of local scientists in Indonesia, Malaysia
and Thailand. It brings together national studies in the three countries.

Parry and his colleagues created a snapshot of the climate at some time
in the future using general circulation models (GCMs). These computer programs
are designed to portray the circulation of the atmosphere. The researchers
evaluated three GCMs and settled on one created by the Goddard Institute
for Space Studies in New York.

Before running the GCM, they fed in a carbon dioxide level double the
present value to represent the cumulative build-up of all greenhouse gases.
Parry says that according to the ‘business-as-usual’ forecast made by the
UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which assumes that no measures
will be taken to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, atmospheric greenhouse
gases will double between 2050 and 2060.

In this new world, the GCM calculated temperature and rainfall patterns
across Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. These values were then fed into
a suite of ‘impact models’ designed to model such things as crop yields,
water runoff and sediment yields for rural river basins.

The researchers assumed that sea level would rise 1 metre by 2090. This
is slightly higher than the ‘business-as-usual’ model, which estimates a
global rise in sea level of 60 cm by 2090. Parry says when the study was
started four years ago the 1-metre rise was considered a good estimate.

The GCM calculated annual temperature rises of 3 °C for Indonesia,
3 to 4 °C for Malaysia and 3 to 6 °C for Thailand. No change in
rainfall pattern emerged for the region as a whole, but there was evidence
of increased rainfall in some areas. In southeast Indonesia, for example,
rainfall could double, says the report. There is also evidence that tropical
cyclones will strike the region more frequently.

In Indonesia, three areas come in for close scrutiny; the Brantas and
Citarum river basins on Java and the Saddan basin on Sulawesi (Celebes).
The increased rainfall in these regions ‘would probably more than compensate
for increasing evaporation due to higher temperatures and there would be
more water to fill reservoirs,’ says the report.

On the face of it, higher rainfall would be good; the areas that could
benefit from irrigation would increase by 30 per cent in the Brantas and
Citarum river basins and by 130 per cent in the Saddan basin. But the downside
is that soil erosion would also increase by 14 per cent, 18 per cent and
40 per cent respectively. This would lead to annual losses of more than
1800 tonnes of soya bean production in the upper Citarum basin, 2250 tonnes
in the Brantas basin and 2430 tonnes in the Saddan river basin. Leaching
from the soil would also reduce its fertility by between 2 and 8 per cent.

The list of other harmful effects is long: rising temperatures would
depress maize yields in some areas by as much as 65 per cent; in the Krawang
and Subang districts of northwest Java, the encroaching sea would cut rice
production by 270 000 tonnes – a 90 per cent reduction; also in Subang,
the advancing sea would reduce fish and shrimp harvests by 3918 tonnes annually,
destroying the livelihoods of 14 500 households.

In Malaysia similar effects were found. The country’s largest rice-growing
area lies along the Muda river on the western coastal plain close to the
Thai border. Higher temperatures there would shorten the maturation period
for rice by several days leading to yield losses of between 12 and 22 per
cent.

In addition, temperature rises would increase demand for irrigation
and restrict the practice of growing two rice crops a year to a much smaller
area. ‘The effect on national rice output would be substantial,’ says the
report.

The findings of the national study for Thailand are less clear. The
GCM produced conflicting predictions in some areas and more work is needed
to produce results of any value. Nevertheless, across the region the report
identifies trends of decreasing crop yields and soil fertility, increasing
soil erosion and demand for irrigation. The socioeconomic effects include
falling rural incomes, migration from coastal plains and hilly regions,
loss of farming jobs and more uncertainty in food supplies.

One of the hoped for benefits of the studies is that Indonesia, Malaysia
and Thailand should be in a better position to counteract the effects of
climatic change. As part of its study, the Indonesian team looked at what
actions could be taken. These included breeding strains of rice resistant
to water and thermal stress, introducing conservation farming at watersheds
to control runoff, reforestation of heavily eroded areas and transmigration
programmes for inhabitants of areas inundated by the sea.

‘When we expand agricultural areas we should take into account climatic
potentials of an area and then develop zoning of crops in response to this.
I think this would be a major way of reducing production losses,’ says Manuel
Bluntran de Rozari, technical coordinator of the Indonesian team.

The studies should also prove useful at the New York PrepCom. ‘These
countries will develop a much better idea of how far they want to go in
negotiations and how far committed they want to be on climate change,’ says
Goh Kiam Song, director of the UN Environment Programme’s Regional Office
for Asia and the Pacific.

The principal difference between North and South over the climate convention
is that many developing countries see global warming as the developed world’s
problem; industrialised countries caused it and must now cut carbon dioxide
emissions, they say. And if the North wants developing nations to retain
their forests to absorb carbon dioxide, it must be prepared to pay. Much
of the Northern world disagrees with this assessment and sees the issue
as one of global concern.

But there are other obstacles between North and South which could block
agreement over the climate convention. ‘There are very great differences
in the understanding of the issues between developed and developing countries.
The Northern countries talk about setting up emission targets and the Southern
ones don’t even know what they mean,’ says Dhira Phantumvanit of the independent
Thailand Development Research Institute, and a delegate to the PrepCom next
week.

‘This great discrepancy exists and yet suddenly we’re talking about
sharing the same concerns. The North understands quite well if it sets up
carbon dioxide stabilisation targets what sort of effect it will have on
its industries and economy but many Southern nations have no idea,’ he says.

Parry’s experience working with the three national study teams confirms
the depth of the divide. He is convinced that developing countries will
not have a climate agreement treaty ‘foisted on them’ by the industrialised
world. In terms of the climate convention, he says the Earth Summit has
come at least two years too early. The research needed to make such an agreement
worthwhile has just not been done. ‘I don’t think a convention has a chance
of being accepted by developing countries until they have a clearer picture
of what climatic change will cost them and whether it’s cheaper to continue
developing and then tackle the impacts of global warming head on when they
come,’ says Parry.

One of the most important aspects of the studies, says Parry, was ‘building’
up teams of scientists capable of taking the research further. ‘I think
we’ve developed a scientific community that knows about climate change and
you cannot overestimate how important that is for a developing country,’
he says.

Indonesia, at least, intends to exploit this expertise to bolster its
position in the climate convention negotiations. Aca Sugandhy, assistant
minister of state for population and environment says: ‘The first priority
for us is to be able to answer how much our national contribution to global
warming is. By that I mean net emissions, so we must account for sinks as
well as sources.’ Sugandhy says Indonesia, with more than 7000 islands,
has massive areas of forest and oceans which act as sinks for carbon dioxide.
He says it is important to include these factors when calculating which
countries contribute to global warming and by how much.

Calculating amounts of emitted and absorbed carbon dioxide is an approach
similar to that advocated by the US. However, some in the Third World have
argued that the results of such equations can be used to tax countries with
net emissions, with the money going to benefit nations which absorb more
carbon dioxide than they emit (‘Ecology and the new colonialism’, Forum,
1 February). Industrialised countries are likely to oppose this approach.

Within Indonesia itself, however, there is a more pressing need. The
national study completed so far has investigated the effects of global warming
on agricultural and coastal life. Sugandhy sees a great need for extending
this research to gauge the impact of global warming in other areas of life:
‘Everyone agrees this study is not complete. We need further detailed studies
to show how temperature changes will effect crop pests, plant disease, human
health and the urban climate. These have been neglected up to now.’

Paul Hunt is a journalist based in Bangkok who specialises in environmental
issues.