Indonesia, A Country With Siege Mentality and Self-Efficacy to Phase Out Emission

Indonesia is very unique country. As the largest archipelago country and lies at the cross road between two oceans, The Indian and The Pacific, and two continents, Asian and Australia, Indonesia has been experiencing tropical climate that is leading this country more dependent on climate. To be prone to climate change, Indonesia has been suffering with tremendous natural disasters, such as earthquakes, big flood, drought, tsunami, and hurricane. The slash-burn method in deforestation, the fossil fuel burn and the use of CFCs are the few drivers of the growth of climate change issue that give dramatic lost on agriculture, marine and fishery sectors as the livelihood of this country due to the more frequent and bigger impact of occuring natural disasters. In the end, we can believe that Indonesia is the victim and the culprit of global climate change at the same time.

Fortunately, Indonesia has key role to determine the fate of the global climate since this country has every single key sources including potential renewable energy resources, human resources, and bigger change effect on climate change due to its unique geographical location, to tackle this issue. However, as the other democratic countries, eventhough Indonesia has many pledges to tackle this issue but they do not equal with the action.

The inactive participation in international climate conferences or movements and also the ambitious strategic key plan is nowhere heard as the main pledge, especially in the election time, have made Indonesia less engaged in international climate negotiation eventhough this country has bigger size to fight for this issue.

Indonesia needs to build the siege mentality and self-efficacy early. Siege mentality is a defensive and paranoid behaviour because of fear. In other hand, self-efficacy is a personality that has level above self-confidence to do the goods bravely and strategically. Eventhough, climate change is a global issue, but the impact has only been experienced directly by some part of the society. Therefore, for those who are still unawaken that the climate change is really happening, still relaxed and believe that we have much more time to tackle this issue later. Siege mentality is needed to make us “afraid” of climate change issue. We need to be afraid because sometimes when we are afraid, we will be more prepared, defensive, and then take real action. Meanwhile, we also need self-efficacy to encourage us that climate change is the responsibility of all nations and Indonesia has key and much measurable opportunity to tackle this issue together with other countries. These key behaviours will lead us to play active in the game and get more proactive to engage with other countries in tackling this huge global game by reaching “Zero Emission by 2050” as the global long term goal to save the future of the world.