Dwindle, the biodiversity in Southeast Asia

Picture of Borneo over the decades from here

Borneo is an island located in South east Asia - its island space is politically divided into Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia. Indonesia makes up a majority percentage of 73%. It has one of the oldest primary forests in the world, similar to amazon forest. It is home to many diverse lifeform - plants and animals like orangutan. In a Nature paper, it states that the deforestation rate in Indonesia has greatly exceeded Brazil. To meet the demand of palm oil based products, deforestation takes place to make way for palm oil plantations. You can see the rate of deforestation from the green spaces in the picture and the projected green spaces left in 2020. The outlook is depressing. Every year, burning and clearing of forest takes place and the neighboring SEA countries such as Singapore and Malaysia experience transboundary haze. Many animals such as orangutan become homeless and the primary forests experienced a great loss of biodiversity, which can accelerate the rate of extinction of many plant species.

The issue with Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Law

The EIA is a process of evaluating the likely environmental impacts of a proposed project or development, taking with consideration to both beneficial and adverse inter-related socio-economic, cultural and human-health impacts. The EIA results will determine if a proposed project can be implemented. If yes, then what kind of actions can be done to mitigate the adverse impacts. If the EIA results show that the project is deemed to be too damaging, then the project will not get approved. This process is mandatory by law in a few countries, for example, European Union countries and Japan. Indonesia has an EIA law in place. But in this case, even if a law is in place, there would be some some "ways" for the deforestation projects to pass the EIA successfully and get approved. A simple and basic reason why such damaging projects pass the EIA:

Economic growth is the ultimate priority for policymakers.

If even policymakers do not care, who can speak on behalf of Nature and the biodiverse lifeforms?

Humans know it is bad and still do it. How psychology can be key?

Increasingly, many environmentalists see the need to increase the environmental awareness of masses. A very effective way to do that is through entertainment like movies. My favorite environment-related movie of all time is Avatar.

For people who do not know the movie, you can read about the movie here. It is totally fiction and nothing to do with any scientific phenomenon or any natural disaster (think deep impact movie) but let me tell you why I like it.

It pulls your heartstrings. It makes you guilty as hell. It BREAKS you.

When the movie was out in 2009, people who have watched it experienced depression and suicidal thoughts. [SPOILER ALERT] I cried when the humans came with the bulldozers and destroyed the hometree of pandora. I cried out LOUD when the humans slaughtered the innocent Na’vi and my husband stared at me with dropping jaws like i was crazy. Now, I am usually a very rational person.

If a movie like this can trigger such psychological attack and stir up emotions in me, i believe it makes people rethink on the imperfect environment and adjust their wasting behavior, then Nature can win!

In fact, there is a strong link between how people buy green things and feel good psychologically. I am not a psychologist but i can describe my feelings. Whenever I managed to reuse a plastic bottle, I feel warm and fuzzy inside that the plastic bottle is not thrown straight away but being used for other purposes. And of course, reverse is true. I feel guilty when I cannot finish my food, knowing well that it will become waste without passing through my intestines first. All of this boils down to the psychology of doing an environmentally good deed and an environmentally bad deed. Turns out this fuzzy and warm feeling is for real! Someone researched it! Not kidding!

Let's do an environmentally good deed and speak for the Nature!

I know many steemians here who are fond of nature and sustainbility. In fact, there is already a community at steemit totally in this! You can click on relevant tags such as nature, environmental, sustainability, etc.

So join us and let's speak for Nature here at steemit! Or better still, do at least 1 environmentally good deed everyday!

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I hope you have enjoyed reading this as much as i have enjoyed writing it.

Follow @coinbitgold aka Celia posts on academia, academiaspotlight, phd, sustainability, life cycle assessment, environment, 3dprinting, justforchuckles, singapore, china and chinese related posts