Towards ‘hybrid accountability’ in EU biofuels policy? Community grievances and competing water claims in the Central Kalimantan oil palm sector

The EU biofuels market is stimulating expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia. Little research has yet examined the impacts on water resources arising from this large-scale land use conversion to cultivation of biofuel feedstock or positioned contextual water resource governance in Indonesian locales in a wider political ecology of European climate politics. Through the concept of ‘hybrid accountability’, we examine primary evidence from an extensive action research process in Central Kalimantan Province, Indonesian Borneo, to assess whether the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive and existing certification schemes offer a way to improve the accountability of market actors and promote sustainable water resource management. We conclude that these initiatives have had no bearing on safeguarding local livelihoods and the water resources they depend on, with governance mechanisms largely failing to address people’s grievances. Rather, the EU’s policies on biofuels have supported a de-politicisation of what needs to be seen as ‘distributional water politics’. Furthermore, certification schemes such as the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil offer, at present, only cosmetic tools and are insufficient to address deep structural governance issues. We argue that further hybridisation of market-based certification and governmental regulation should be designed with the purpose of providing new transnational recourse mechanisms and remedies for affected communities.     

Pacification,resistance, and territoriality: prospects for a space of peace in East Timor

Despite current United Nations-sponsored negotiations on East Timor between Indonesia and Portugal, there is little prospect for success given the overwhelming advantages Indonesia enjoys in the struggle for control over the territory. The territorialization of Indonesian power in East Timor over the last two decades has given Jakarta a level of dominance that has allowed it to avoid serious negotiations aimed at resolving the conflict. By interrogating social power in conjunction with Knight's (1994) three key components of statehood (territory, population, and sovereignty) on a variety of geographical scales, however, it becomes clear that East Timor is a far more contested terrain than it first appears. This paper illustrates that the peace process can succeed in a manner consistent with international law and human rights only by a strengthening of the forces of resistance, which necessarily entails the West's altering its relationship of criminal complicity with Indonesia.     

我们需要保护自然资源吗？

正常而言，在印度尼西亚的苏门答腊和加里曼丹岛，即使在非厄尔尼诺年，每年6月或7月的旱季会出现烟雾问题。研究发现，近年来烟雾问题并不仅仅出现在旱季，雨季也有发生。进一步的观测和野外调研表明，这些烟雾来源于用火烧的方式进行油棕榈及其它林木种植前的土地整理，然而这种方式早已被完全禁止。结果，这两个省的绝大多数的水灾灾区位于这些植被被焚毁的地区。     

密闭取心饱和度校正数学模型

利用密闭取心井资料分析油、水饱和度是目前最直接有效的方法,但是由于岩心上提导致的孔隙体积变大、降压脱气和钻井液侵入等过程的影响,岩心测试油、水饱和度之和一般均只有75%~85%,油、水饱和度都有较大损失,因而需要对油、水饱和度进行校正,争取求准饱和度数据。本次研究进行了挥发过程及岩心上提过程的室内实验,发现密闭取心降压脱气过程是造成油水饱和度损失的主要因素,目前实验条件难以如实模拟这一过程,研究中以流体分流率原理为核心,建立了降压脱气的数学校正模型;降压还会导致孔隙增大,岩心的覆压孔渗实验能够准确反映这一变化,为油水饱和度校正提供依据。建立的密闭取心饱和度校正数学模型精度与保压密闭取心的测试结果相当,具有推广意义。钻井液浸入造成的油水饱和度损失数量比较小,但是疏松砂岩中强浸的岩心样品油水饱和度数据需要校正,校正量一般不大于2%。     

Preliminary investigation of biogenic gas production in Indonesian low rank coals and implications for a renewable energy source

Indonesia has abundant coal resources at depths suitable to contain substantial volumes of naturally occurring methane, which are currently being explored. Most Indonesian coals are thermally immature, but are composed of hydrogen-rich organic components that are presumed to make them excellent substrates for biogenic methane production. Gas isotope results from pilot wells in South Sumatra, reported in this study, are interpreted to indicate biogenic origins for the methane. Corresponding formation water samples were collected and incubated, and show the presence of indigenous microbial communities capable of producing methane from Indonesian and Australian coal. Although these results are only preliminary, they are promising and support the possibility of Indonesia developing bio renewable energy from coal seams.     

Pudrición del Cogollo and the (post-)neoliberal ecological fix in Ecuador's palm oil industry

This paper examines the variegated natures of (post-)neoliberal environmental governance in Latin America using environmental crisis as an entry point. It examines the institutional measures put forth by Ecuador’s government, in concert with other actors, to contain and manage the damaging effects of an insidious palm oil plant disease known as Pudrición del Cogollo (PC). Using empirical data collected through qualitative means, my analysis demonstrates that nature’s biophysical processes – in particular, disease ecologies – can play a crucial role in the pursuit and achievement of national accumulation goals. Specifically, I argue that the ecologies of the PC crisis have been rendered functional to the Ecuadorian government’s current political and economic strategies of intensified accumulation and market competitiveness. By making environmental crisis the basis of key accumulation strategies, the state is able to convert negative environmental outcomes into opportunities for profit-generation. Utilizing the notion of the ‘ecological fix’, this paper reveals two major conclusions: (1) plant health emergencies and the actions used to mitigate environmental crises are not only challenges but opportunities that can be mobilized to support further accumulation strategies and (2) the study of PC and Ecuador’s palm oil industry provides new fruitful terrain to examine the connections between the deepening variegated effects of neoliberalism through nature and environmental crisis solutions in Latin America.     

Resisting coal: Hydrocarbon politics and assemblages of protest in the UK and Indonesia

This article examines the social and material politics of coal, focusing on mobilizations against opencast mining in the United Kingdom and Indonesia. Contested spaces and practices elicited by coal extraction provide important openings through which to understand how ‘hydrocarbon modernity’ is experienced and entangled with different processes of neoliberal capitalism. We investigate resistance against coal at Ffos-y-Fran in South Wales and the IndoMet project in the Indonesian province of Central Kalimantan, exploring how assemblages of protest have challenged the material effects, discursive practices and regimes of accumulation attendant within the coal industry. In both countries, campaigns seeking to ‘end coal’ have built dynamic geographical alliances, and as collective challenges to mining activities have unfolded, we consider how movements targeting specific sites of extraction have sought to disrupt the industry’s 'dis-embedding' of coal from the landscape. Drawing on accounts of how hydrocarbon politics shape societies, the approach we present draws attention to changing linkages between economic, environmental and social advocacy while illuminating the varied ways in which coal mining can compound and perpetuate inequality.     

Sovereignty and subterranean resources: An institutional ethnography of Repsol’s corporate social responsibility programs in Ecuador

State mandated corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs emerged in Ecuador in the 1990s, following indigenous protests rooted in social and environmental impacts of oil extraction. CSR programs aim to deflect blame for a company’s operations, by providing development or infrastructural improvements in indigenous communities, including micro-credit projects, potable water systems, and electricity. Through an institutional ethnography of CSR programs of the Spanish owned multinational oil company, Repsol, I explore how companies intervene in transformations of social life challenging the roles of the state in securing its territorial sovereignty linked to subterranean oil resources. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis of company and state documents, my analysis demonstrates how CSR programs allow companies to secure their presence in the region, even in the face of shifting regimes of governance. In this article, I provide more insight into Ecuador’s transition from neoliberal to post-neoliberal eras, by calling attention to social processes that seek to legitimize expansion of corporate capital in spaces of sovereignty. If state control over subterranean resources is still crucial to understanding forms of sovereignty, then the extension of that control via CSR programs represents new relationships of power that construct the company as an expert in the region. Exploring the everyday processes of these legal relationships of sovereignty through an institutional ethnography of CSR programs uncovers the programs’ impacts and effects that seek to consolidate power in the company, undermine indigenous rights, and discipline the state.     

Why do smallholders plant biofuel crops? The ‘politics of consent’ in Mexico

Recent studies have addressed the social and environmental impacts of biofuel crops but seldom the question as to why rural producers engage in their production. It is particularly unclear how governments worldwide, especially in middle-income countries such as Brazil, Thailand, and Mexico, could enroll so many smallholders in biofuel cropping projects. Conventional views see yields and economic returns as main drivers for smallholder participation in biofuel production but ignore the role played by power and politics. This paper analyses the rapid biofuel expansions (oil palm, jatropha) in the southern Lacandon rainforest in Chiapas (Mexico) and their partial failure (jatropha) from a political ecology perspective. Our findings indicate that biofuel expansions in this region not only occurred for productive reasons, but also because biofuel programmes provided prospects for political gains through strengthened rural organisations. In contrast with emphasis on state coercion and local resistance—common in political ecology—the biofuel expansion relied, in this case, upon a ‘politics of consent’ in which both the state and rural organisations, albeit in a power-laden relationship, sought to achieve their own goals by supporting the planting of biofuel crops. These findings suggest the need to rethink how particular approaches within political ecology apply Gramsci’s notions of power and hegemony and, more broadly, to consider the importance of politics in explaining why certain forms of agricultural production become dominant.     

Assessment of seawater intrusion to the agricultural sustainability at the coastal area of Carey Island, Selangor, Malaysia

Groundwater suitability for agriculture in an island with limited recharge area may easily be influenced by seawater intrusion. The aim of this study was to investigate seawater intrusion to the suitability of the groundwater for oil palm cultivation at the ex-promontory land of Carey Island in Malaysia. This is the first study that used the integrated method of geo-electrical resistivity and hydro-geochemical methods to investigate seawater intrusion to the suitability of groundwater for oil palm cultivation at two different land cover condition. The relationship between earth resistivity, total dissolved solids and earth conductivity was derived with crop suitability classification according to salinity, used to identify water types and also oil palm tolerance to salinity. Results from the contour conductivity maps show that area facing severe coastal erosion and area still intact with mangrove forest exhibits unsuitable groundwater condition for oil palm at the unconfined aquifer thickness of 15 and 31 m, respectively. Based on local sea-level rise prediction and Ghyben–Herzberg assumption (sharp interface), the condition in the study area, especially in severe erosion area, by the twenty-first century will no longer be suitable for oil palm plantation. The application of geo-electrical method combined with geochemical data, aided with the information on environmental history and oil palm physiography, has demonstrated that the integration of techniques is an effective tool in defining the status of agricultural suitability affected by salinity at the coastal aquifer area.     

Social vulnerability to natural hazards in Indonesia: driving factors and policy implications

Indonesia is located in the Pacific Ring of Fire and situated at the joining point of four major world tectonic plates. Regions of Indonesia are highly prone to various natural hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. Some recent major natural hazard events are the 2004 tsunami in Aceh and Nias and the 2010 Mount Merapi volcanic eruptions in Central Java. In parallel with advancement in knowledge of the existing hazards, the importance of social aspects of vulnerability in mitigating natural hazards has been acknowledged by the Indonesian government. However, to date, there is no institutionalized effort for assessing social vulnerability to natural hazards that would cover all the districts of Indonesia. Accordingly, no comprehensive profile of social vulnerability is available as basis information for developing strategies to prevent larger risk and losses and reduce vulnerability of communities in Indonesia. Only a few studies have been conducted in Indonesia on this field. This study attempts to fill this gap by quantifying the social vulnerability of Indonesian districts to natural hazards, determining its driving factors and mapping its variations. The social vulnerability index (SoVI) approach is utilized in this study. Three main driving factors affecting social vulnerability in Indonesia are found: ‘socioeconomic status and infrastructure,’ ‘gender, age and population growth’ and ‘family structure.’ The combination of SoVI with thematic map utilizing ArcView GIS can be used to identify districts with relative high social vulnerability level. The results can support the prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery programs of the impacts of natural hazards in Indonesia.     

国内外油页岩资源现状及综合开发潜力分析

油页岩作为一种重要的替代能源资源引起了国内外的关注,其主要分布于美国、澳大利亚、巴西、俄罗斯、加拿大、中国、爱沙尼亚等国家。油页岩从寒武纪到第三纪都有分布,沉积环境主要为海相、陆相和湖相。根据目前全球33个国家和地区油页岩资源现状,若将它折算成页岩油约4 000 亿t。我国油页岩资源丰富,分布于22个省区、47个盆地、80个含矿区。油页岩主要集中分布在吉林、广东、辽宁、山东、新疆和海南等省区。沉积时代以新生代的第三纪为主,主要为湖相沉积。不断提高技术,坚持综合开发利用,走炼油-化工-发电-多金属-建材一条龙联合生产的途径,油页岩资源将具有巨大的综合开发潜力。     

Geochemistry and petrology of selected coal samples from Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Papua, Indonesia

Indonesia has become the world's largest exporter of thermal coal and is a major supplier to the Asian coal market, particularly as the People's Republic of China is now (2007) and perhaps may remain a net importer of coal. Indonesia has had a long history of coal production, mainly in Sumatra and Kalimantan, but only in the last two decades have government and commercial forces resulted in a remarkable coal boom. A recent assessment of Indonesian coal-bed methane (CBM) potential has motivated active CBM exploration. Most of the coal is Paleogene and Neogene, low to moderate rank and has low ash yield and sulfur (generally < 10 and < 1 wt.%, respectively). Active tectonic and igneous activity has resulted in significant rank increase in some coal basins. Eight coal samples are described that represent the major export and/or resource potential of Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Papua. Detailed geochemistry, including proximate and ultimate analysis, sulfur forms, and major, minor, and trace element determinations are presented. Organic petrology and vitrinite reflectance data reflect various precursor flora assemblages and rank variations, including sample composites from active igneous and tectonic areas. A comparison of Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs) elements abundance with world and US averages show that the Indonesian coals have low combustion pollution potential.     

Scenario Prediction of China’s Oil Resource Demand in 2020-2030

Oil plays an important role in ensuring national energy security. It is of great significance for China’s energy policy-making to predict the future oil demand scientifically. Combined with the grey correlation analysis and combination model of ARIMA-BP neural network, data on six driving variables of China’s GDP, international oil price, energy consumption per unit GDP, industrial structure, urbanization rate and oil production in 1999-2018 were selected to predict China’s oil demand under different scenarios in 2020-2030. The results show that the selected driving variables are highly correlated with China’s oil demand, and the combined model is more accurate than the single model. From 2020 to 2030, China’s oil demand and import will continue to increase, but the growth rate will gradually slow down. Under the three scenarios, the predicted average oil demand in 2020, 2025 and 2030 will be 675.7703 million tons, 732.2725 million tons and 760.8155 million tons, respectively; the predicted average external dependence in 2020-2030 will be 76.19%, far exceeding the international warning line of 50%. The contradiction between China’s oil supply and demand will be more acute, and accordingly, some policy suggestions were put forward.     

Indigenous mobilities,territorialization, and dispossession in the Sierra de Perijá, Venezuela: Rescuing lands and meanings in Hábitat Indígena Yukpa,Toromo-Tütari

In the Sierra de Perijá, Venezuela, the indigenous Yukpa have long faced reterritorialization and violent displacement through the expansion of cattle farms, so-called haciendas. However, the new Venezuelan constitution in 2000 guaranteed rights to indigenous territory and ushered in an endogenous, community-based development model. By the 2010s, Yukpa had reclaimed a half-dozen haciendas, taking advantage of the political leverage and economic opportunities provided by the endogenous development model. This process of deterritorialization has been accompanied by extensive migration of residents from mountain communities to the lowlands, and these reconfigurations of Yukpa spatiality have prompted reconceptualization of a diasporic, multi-sited indigenous identity.     

Surface pollution of the Pacific Ocean by petrochemicals

Dangerous influence of all kinds of surface pollution on marine environment especially on fishery basins is a part of an ecological problem. Oil forms are actively spread by intensive navigation and wind-wave activity. Research into ocean pollution allowed to work out a conception of how to combat it. The essence of this conception consists in controlling migratory oil forms in water and changing pollution into such forms which can be easily removed from the marine environment or which are subject to intensive natural biochemical degradation. For this purpose a number of ecological experiments were carried out. The data received are shown in tables.     

塔里木盆地哈得逊及相邻地区原油含氮化合物分布特征及油藏充注方向探讨

塔里木盆地哈得逊及相邻地区存在一些化学组成相似的中一高密度原油。对原油中含氮化合物浓度和相对组成特征进行了较系统的研究，结果表明，原油中含氮化合物分布特征和原油的运移分馏效应存在较好的成因联系。随着运移作用的加强，“屏蔽”型与“暴露”型或“半屏蔽”型化合物的比值增加，含氮化合物浓度下降，且不同化合物之间的比值均表现出较强的协同变化关系。含氮化合物运移参数的分布特征表明，哈得4油田原油总体上具有由北向南的运移和充注过程。这与区域上原油的运移方向是一致的。     

Review of oil agglomeration techniques for processing of fine coals

Large quantities of fine coals are generated during mining and preparation stages and a significant portion of these fines is lost as refuse. Oil agglomeration shows promise of being able to minimise fine coal losses and to recover combustible matter from refuse ponds. This paper, based on a detailed literature review, presents: (a) physical-chemical and process engineering principles of oil agglomeration; (b) a comparative summary and specific process highlights of the more developed oil agglomeration processes; and (c) a critical evaluation of oil agglomeration in terms of selection of oil, process benefits and economic aspects.     

Multilayered regionalization in Northern Europe

The broadening and deepening of Europe as a macro-region impels processes of expansion, contraction and transformation in sub-regions positioned within the EU and across the EU’s border. Recent arguments stress the idea of regionalization as a multi-layered process. Using Northern Europe as a study site, three such layers are explored: territorially bounded regionalization in the voting patterns of the Eurovision Song Contest, networked regionalization in the membership of intergovernmental organizations, and fluid regionalization in the geography of language. The associated regionalization processes are explained and visualized using mixed methodologies. Across these three layers of regionalization we can see the persistence of a Scandinavian core, but various territorial, networked and fluid forms of regionalization are stretching and pulling at the edges of Nordic regionalizations.     

Verifying Indigenous based-claims to forest rights using image interpretation and spatial analysis: a case study in Gunung Lumut Protection Forest,East Kalimantan,Indonesia

GeoJournal - The decision of Indonesian’s constitutional court in May 2013, to review Law Number 41/1999 on Forestry, marked a significant step forward in Indonesian policy related to...