B2 · Upper Intermediate
15 min
climateenvironmentgeopoliticsindonesianatural disasters
Fire and Future: Indonesia on the Edge of the World
El Fuego y el Futuro: Indonesia en el Filo del Mundo
Three hikers were killed by the eruption of Mount Dukono on the Indonesian island of Halmahera. That fact opens a conversation about the country most exposed to climate change in the world, and also one of its biggest emitters.
Tres excursionistas murieron en la erupción del volcán Dukono, en la isla de Halmahera, Indonesia. Ese hecho abre una conversación sobre el país más vulnerable del mundo ante el cambio climático, y también uno de sus mayores emisores.
6 essential B2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| sumidero | sink (as in carbon sink) | Los bosques tropicales son sumideros de carbono esenciales para el equilibrio climático del planeta. |
| turbera | peatland | Las turberas de Indonesia almacenan enormes cantidades de carbono acumulado durante miles de años. |
| a pesar de | despite, in spite of | A pesar de los riesgos conocidos, los excursionistas decidieron subir al volcán. |
| archipiélago | archipelago | Indonesia es el archipiélago más grande del mundo, con más de diecisiete mil islas. |
| transición energética | energy transition | La transición energética en países en desarrollo requiere financiación internacional para ser viable. |
| pérdidas y daños | loss and damage (climate term) | El fondo de pérdidas y daños aprobado en la COP28 busca compensar a los países más vulnerables al cambio climático. |
Three hikers went up a mountain in Indonesia this week and didn't come back down.
Mount Dukono, on the island of Halmahera, erupted.
Three dead, two still missing, fifteen pulled out alive.
And the reason I want to talk about it isn't the eruption itself.
It's the country it happened in.
Indonesia es un caso extraordinario cuando hablamos del clima.
Indonesia is an extraordinary case when we talk about climate.
Es un país que sufre enormemente las consecuencias del cambio climático, pero que al mismo tiempo es uno de los mayores productores de carbón del mundo.
It's a country that suffers enormously from the consequences of climate change, but at the same time it's one of the world's biggest coal producers.
Esa contradicción define todo lo que le pasa.
That contradiction defines everything that happens there.
Before we get there, let's just sit with the geography for a moment.
Indonesia is seventeen thousand islands.
Seventeen thousand.
It spans roughly the same east-west distance as the continental United States.
And it sits on what geologists call the Ring of Fire.
El Anillo de Fuego es la zona sísmica y volcánica más activa del planeta.
The Ring of Fire is the most seismically and volcanically active zone on the planet.
Indonesia tiene más de ciento treinta volcanes activos.
Indonesia has more than a hundred and thirty active volcanoes.
El Dukono es uno de los más activos de todos, en realidad.
Dukono is actually one of the most active of all.
Ha estado en erupción casi de forma continua desde los años treinta.
It has been erupting almost continuously since the 1930s.
Continuously since the thirties.
And hikers were still going up it.
I spent some time in Indonesia years ago, reporting on the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, and I remember being struck by how matter-of-fact people were about the earth moving under their feet.
Es que cuando vives rodeado de volcanes y terremotos, desarrollas una relación diferente con el riesgo.
When you live surrounded by volcanoes and earthquakes, you develop a different relationship with risk.
No es que la gente sea imprudente, es que el peligro forma parte del paisaje desde siempre.
It's not that people are reckless, it's that danger has always been part of the landscape.
Lo que cambia con el clima es que ahora aparecen riesgos nuevos encima de los que ya existían.
What changes with climate is that new risks now appear on top of the ones that already existed.
And volcanoes and climate have a longer relationship than most people realize.
The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, also in Indonesia, caused what historians call the Year Without a Summer.
1816.
Crops failed across the Northern Hemisphere.
There were frosts in June in New England.
El Tambora es probablemente la erupción más poderosa en los últimos diez mil años.
Tambora is probably the most powerful eruption in the last ten thousand years.
Mató directamente a entre diez mil y doce mil personas.
It directly killed between ten and twelve thousand people.
Pero el frío que causó después provocó hambrunas en Europa, en Asia, en América.
But the cold it caused afterwards triggered famines in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
Algunos historiadores calculan que murieron otras doscientas mil personas como consecuencia indirecta.
Some historians estimate another two hundred thousand people died as an indirect consequence.
And it affected culture in ways that are hard to trace but real.
Mary Shelley was stuck indoors that summer in Geneva because the weather was so terrible.
That's when she wrote Frankenstein.
Lord Byron wrote a poem called Darkness.
There's this thread connecting an Indonesian volcano to the birth of Gothic literature.
Eso es algo que mucha gente no sabe.
That's something a lot of people don't know.
Los volcanes pueden enfriar el planeta porque lanzan dióxido de azufre a la estratosfera, que forma aerosoles y refleja la luz solar.
Volcanoes can cool the planet because they throw sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, which forms aerosols that reflect sunlight.
Es el efecto contrario al del cambio climático, que calienta la atmósfera.
It's the opposite effect to climate change, which warms the atmosphere.
Algunos científicos incluso han estudiado si es posible imitar ese proceso artificialmente.
Some scientists have even studied whether it's possible to artificially mimic that process.
Geoengineering.
Deliberately injecting particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight.
It's one of the more alarming proposals in climate science because the potential for unintended consequences is enormous.
Who decides?
Who controls the thermostat for the whole planet?
Es una pregunta de geopolítica tanto como de ciencia.
It's as much a geopolitical question as a scientific one.
Pero volvamos a Indonesia, porque el caso indonesio es fascinante precisamente porque el país vive esa tensión entre víctima y actor del cambio climático de una manera muy concreta, muy visible.
But let's go back to Indonesia, because the Indonesian case is fascinating precisely because the country lives that tension between victim and actor in climate change in a very concrete, very visible way.
Let's talk about Jakarta.
I was there in 2007 for a few weeks and parts of the city were already flooding regularly.
Jakarta is sinking at a rate that, in some northern districts, has been clocked at around twenty-five centimeters a year.
And it sits on the coast of a warming sea.
El hundimiento de Yakarta no es solo por el cambio climático.
Jakarta's sinking isn't just because of climate change.
Es también porque la ciudad extrae demasiada agua subterránea para abastecer a treinta millones de personas.
It's also because the city extracts too much groundwater to supply thirty million people.
El suelo literalmente se colapsa.
The ground literally collapses.
Pero el aumento del nivel del mar lo convierte en una emergencia, porque el agua del océano ya no tiene que subir tanto para inundar la ciudad.
But rising sea levels turn it into an emergency, because ocean water doesn't have to rise as much to flood the city.
Which is why Indonesia made the extraordinary decision to move its capital entirely.
To a brand new city, Nusantara, being carved out of the jungle in Borneo.
Though the last I read, the project is significantly behind schedule and massively over budget.
El proyecto Nusantara es un caso de estudio fascinante.
The Nusantara project is a fascinating case study.
La idea era crear una capital moderna, sostenible, en medio de la selva.
The idea was to create a modern, sustainable capital in the middle of the jungle.
Pero construir una ciudad desde cero en una zona selvática tiene sus propias consecuencias medioambientales.
But building a city from scratch in a forested area has its own environmental consequences.
Para hacer espacio a la nueva capital, hay que talar bosques.
To make space for the new capital, you have to cut down forests.
Es una paradoja difícil de resolver.
It's a paradox that's hard to resolve.
And Borneo's forests are not just any forests.
They're among the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet.
And they've already lost roughly half their original cover in the last few decades, mostly to palm oil plantations.
El aceite de palma es otro de esos temas donde Indonesia ocupa una posición incómoda.
Palm oil is another one of those issues where Indonesia occupies an uncomfortable position.
El país produce más de la mitad del aceite de palma del mundo.
The country produces more than half the world's palm oil.
Es un motor económico enorme, da trabajo a millones de personas.
It's a huge economic engine, it employs millions of people.
Pero la deforestación que genera es devastadora para el clima global, porque los bosques tropicales son uno de los principales sumideros de carbono del planeta.
But the deforestation it generates is devastating for the global climate, because tropical forests are one of the planet's main carbon sinks.
Carbon sink meaning the forest absorbs more CO2 than it releases.
Burn or clear it, and you flip that equation.
You release centuries of stored carbon in a matter of years.
I remember interviewing an environmental scientist in Jakarta who told me that on certain days, Indonesia's emissions from peatland fires alone exceeded those of the entire U.S.
economy.
Eso es literalmente posible.
That is literally possible.
Las turberas indonesias son depósitos de carbono orgánico que llevan miles de años acumulándose.
Indonesian peatlands are deposits of organic carbon that have been accumulating for thousands of years.
Cuando se secan por el drenaje para hacer plantaciones y luego se queman, la cantidad de CO2 que liberan es casi inimaginable.
When they're drained for plantations and then burned, the amount of CO2 they release is almost unimaginable.
Los incendios de 2015 en Indonesia fueron una catástrofe climática que apenas tuvo cobertura internacional.
The 2015 fires in Indonesia were a climate catastrophe that barely received international coverage.
And yet Indonesia is also a country where hundreds of millions of people are still trying to climb out of poverty.
You can't tell someone who earns two dollars a day from a palm oil harvest that their work is the problem.
The moral and political geometry of this is genuinely complicated.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
Y eso es lo que hace que las negociaciones climáticas sean tan difíciles.
And that's what makes climate negotiations so difficult.
Los países ricos contaminaron durante ciento cincuenta años para desarrollarse, y ahora le dicen a Indonesia que no puede hacer lo mismo.
Rich countries polluted for a hundred and fifty years to develop, and now they're telling Indonesia it can't do the same.
Es una posición que muchos indonesios encuentran, comprensiblemente, bastante hipócrita.
It's a position that many Indonesians find, understandably, quite hypocritical.
The historical emissions argument.
It comes up every time.
And it's not wrong.
The cumulative CO2 in the atmosphere today is overwhelmingly the product of industrialized countries that got rich burning coal and oil.
The damage is already there.
The question is who pays to fix it.
Indonesia tiene una de las reservas de carbón más grandes del mundo, y el carbón representa todavía una parte enorme de su producción eléctrica.
Indonesia has one of the world's largest coal reserves, and coal still represents a huge share of its electricity generation.
En 2022, el país firmó un acuerdo con países ricos llamado Just Energy Transition Partnership, que prometía veinte mil millones de dólares para ayudar a Indonesia a alejarse del carbón.
In 2022, the country signed an agreement with rich countries called the Just Energy Transition Partnership, which promised twenty billion dollars to help Indonesia move away from coal.
Pero la implementación ha sido muy lenta.
But implementation has been very slow.
Twenty billion sounds like a lot.
It isn't.
Not for a country of two hundred and seventy million people trying to rewire an entire energy system.
And when the promised money comes in the form of loans rather than grants, the equation changes pretty fast.
Y mientras tanto, China sigue comprando el carbón indonesio.
And meanwhile, China keeps buying Indonesian coal.
India también.
India too.
Para Indonesia, salir del carbón no es solo una decisión técnica, es una decisión geopolítica.
For Indonesia, getting out of coal isn't just a technical decision, it's a geopolitical one.
Si los países occidentales quieren que Indonesia haga la transición, tienen que hacer que esa transición sea económicamente viable.
If Western countries want Indonesia to transition, they need to make that transition economically viable.
Hasta ahora, no lo han conseguido del todo.
So far, they haven't quite managed it.
There's something almost cruel about the timing.
Sea levels are rising.
Jakarta is sinking.
Halmahera erupts and kills hikers.
And at the same moment, the country is caught between Chinese coal demand, Western climate pressure, domestic energy poverty, and an economy that needs to grow.
All of that is happening at once.
Lo que me parece más importante subrayar es que Indonesia no es un caso único.
What I think is most important to underline is that Indonesia is not a unique case.
Es el ejemplo más visible de una situación que afecta a docenas de países: los que menos han contribuido al problema climático son los que están pagando el precio más alto.
It's the most visible example of a situation that affects dozens of countries: those who have contributed least to the climate problem are paying the highest price.
Bangladesh, las islas del Pacífico, partes de África subsahariana.
Bangladesh, the Pacific islands, parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
El patrón se repite.
The pattern repeats.
Climate justice.
That's the term that's been circulating in international negotiations for years, and it keeps running into the same wall, which is that the countries with the most historical responsibility also have the most political leverage to avoid paying for it.
En la COP28 de 2023, en Dubái, se llegó a un acuerdo para crear un fondo de pérdidas y daños destinado a los países más vulnerables.
At COP28 in 2023 in Dubai, an agreement was reached to create a loss and damage fund for the most vulnerable countries.
Fue un momento histórico.
It was a historic moment.
Pero los compromisos concretos de financiación siguen siendo muy modestos comparados con la escala del problema.
But the concrete funding commitments remain very modest compared to the scale of the problem.
Loss and damage.
That's a term that took decades to even get into the official negotiating language.
The idea being that some climate damage can no longer be adapted to, it just has to be compensated.
A village that's permanently underwater can't adapt its way out of being permanently underwater.
Y eso nos lleva a una pregunta que me parece fundamental: ¿qué significa realmente la soberanía de un Estado si su territorio desaparece bajo el agua?
And that leads us to a question I find fundamental: what does the sovereignty of a state really mean if its territory disappears under water?
Kiribati, Tuvalu, las Maldivas.
Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Maldives.
Son países que podrían dejar de existir físicamente en este siglo.
These are countries that could cease to physically exist this century.
Eso no tiene precedentes en el derecho internacional.
That has no precedent in international law.
Tuvalu actually signed a treaty with Australia a couple of years ago that would give its citizens the right to live and work in Australia as the islands become uninhabitable.
And the government of Tuvalu intends to maintain statehood even without physical territory.
A digital nation.
A country that exists in law but not in land.
Es algo que parece de ciencia ficción pero que es perfectamente real.
It sounds like science fiction but it's completely real.
Y volviendo a Indonesia, el país tiene sus propias versiones de ese dilema a menor escala.
And going back to Indonesia, the country has its own versions of that dilemma on a smaller scale.
Hay islas indonesias pequeñas que ya han desaparecido o están a punto de desaparecer.
There are small Indonesian islands that have already disappeared or are about to disappear.
El archipiélago se está reduciendo.
The archipelago is shrinking.
Seventeen thousand islands becoming sixteen thousand nine hundred and some.
Each one a community, a history, a set of fishing rights, a dialect possibly spoken nowhere else on earth.
Indonesia tiene más de setecientas lenguas distintas.
Indonesia has more than seven hundred distinct languages.
Eso es una riqueza lingüística y cultural que no tiene equivalente en el mundo, a excepción quizás de Papúa Nueva Guinea.
That's a linguistic and cultural richness with no equivalent in the world, except perhaps Papua New Guinea.
Y parte de esa diversidad está directamente en riesgo porque las comunidades que hablan esas lenguas están perdiendo su territorio.
And part of that diversity is directly at risk because the communities that speak those languages are losing their territory.
Languages dying because the land drowned.
That's a sentence I could not have written twenty years ago without sounding alarmist.
Now it's just a description of what's happening.
Y todo esto empezó con tres excursionistas en un volcán de Halmahera.
And all of this started with three hikers on a volcano in Halmahera.
Eso es lo que me parece hermoso de seguir las noticias de esta manera: un hecho pequeño, concreto, abre una ventana hacia algo mucho más grande.
That's what I find beautiful about following the news this way: a small, concrete fact opens a window onto something much larger.
That's a generous framing for what is, at its core, a tragedy.
Three people didn't make it home.
But I take your point.
The small event and the enormous context are the same story.
Oye, antes de terminar, me di cuenta de que usé una frase antes que quizás vale la pena comentar.
Hey, before we finish, I noticed I used a phrase earlier that might be worth looking at.
Dije que Indonesia está "a pesar de" todo este sufrimiento todavía atrapada en el carbón.
I said that Indonesia is, despite all this suffering, still trapped in coal.
Ese "a pesar de" es muy útil en español.
That 'a pesar de' is very useful in Spanish.
You did use that.
I caught it.
It's the kind of phrase where I usually reach for "despite" or "in spite of" in English and then realize Spanish just has this one clean construction for both.
How does it actually work?
Can you put it anywhere in the sentence?
Sí, tiene bastante flexibilidad.
Yes, it's quite flexible.
"A pesar de" siempre va seguido de un sustantivo o de un infinitivo.
'A pesar de' is always followed by a noun or an infinitive.
Por ejemplo: "a pesar del calor, salieron a caminar" o "a pesar de saber el riesgo, subieron al volcán".
For example: 'despite the heat, they went out for a walk' or 'despite knowing the risk, they climbed the volcano.' What you can't do is put it directly in front of a conjugated verb.
Lo que no puedes hacer es ponerlo delante de un verbo conjugado directamente.
So if I want a conjugated verb after it, I need something else.
"Aunque," right?
"Aunque sabían el riesgo." Even though they knew the risk.
That's where the subjunctive can sneak in too, depending on whether you're talking about something real or hypothetical.
Exacto.
Exactly.
A veces pienso que aprendes más gramática hablando de volcanes que estudiando un libro de texto.
Sometimes I think you learn more grammar talking about volcanoes than studying a textbook.
At least nobody's telling a waiter they're pregnant.
Progress, Octavio.
Progress.