Isra-Mart srl : Low-Carbon Economy Will Require Public-Private Cooperation: GE CEO

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Business leaders have emphasized the need for collaboration with emerging-market governments and community groups to address the environmental challenges facing the world.

Stuart Dean, chief executive of General Electric’s Southeast Asian unit, said on Thursday that resolving these problems would require a “huge amount of collaboration from industries, NGOs [and] governments.”

Speaking at the opening plenary discussion of the Business for the Environment (B4E) summit in Jakarta, Dean said Indonesia and other emerging countries should take more action toward developing their green economies.

“In the coming years, 80 percent of infrastructure will be built in emerging countries like Indonesia,” he said.

For its part, he said, GE had been making efforts to reduce its carbon footprint by improving efficiency at more than 100 of its factories around the world.

He said the US-based company had also doubled its research and development fund to $2 billion within the past year to find ways to increase fuel efficiency and become more environmentally friendly.

The B4E conference is sponsored by Lippo Group, of which the Jakarta Globe is an affiliate.

Peggy Liu, chairwoman of the Joint US-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, said Indonesia could learn from China’s participation over the last few years in what she called the “green race.”

She said 70 percent of the energy demand in that country came from industries, while a burgeoning middle class embracing better living standards was also putting pressure on energy resources.

To solve the problem, she said, China had spent $7.3 billion developing a smart grid to meet the growing demand for power.

Liu said that because China was developing infrastructure from the ground up and on a large scale, it was able to experiment with things like water and waste management.

However, a similar smart grid for Indonesia is still far off, according to Suroso Isnandar, a spokesman for state electricity company Perusahaan Listrik Negara.

He said PLN was carrying out feasibility studies to determine whether the solution was worth pursuing, adding that funding would likely be the biggest issue for development.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who opened the B4E summit, said there would be intense pressure on clean air, food, energy, water and other resources as the world population swelled to 9 billion by 2050.

He said that in Indonesia, this had spurred the green economic mantra of pro-growth, pro-job, pro-poor, pro-environment and pro-business development.