By: Ciptanti Putri

Twenty days ahead of the global Earth Hour campaign which in Indonesia will take place on March 29, 2014 local time, a series of actions with various themes continue to be held. If last week 23 cities supporting the Earth Hour campaign simultaneously held the #PlastikTakAsik action, then on March 9, 2014 tomorrow the action will take the theme #BijakKertas. It has been confirmed that 26 cities supporting the Earth Hour campaign will participate with various activities related to the socialization of paper-saving lifestyle behavior.

In Jakarta, activities will take place in the Car Free Day (CFD) area along Jalan Sudirman - Thamrin, starting at 6:30 am. A number of activities will be conducted, including Waste Research (collecting and counting the waste produced by CFD activities for a few hours only), book binding of used paper with only one side used, collection of used books that are still worth reading to be distributed to reading parks and schools in rural areas, and collection of used paper, newspapers, magazines to be recycled by collectors. The day's event was also enlivened by a 'Heart Mob' performance by students of the London School of Public Relations Jakarta.

In Bandung, the action has started since tonight (8/3). Bandung's Earth Hour community held a waste paper collection in the middle of the "Braga Culinary Night". They weighed and showed the public present there the amount of paper waste generated by the culinary activity. The next morning, the #BijakKertas action was held at the Dago CFD area, with the addition of a number of meaningful workshop sessions filled with a number of corporate partners supporting the Earth Hour campaign in Indonesia.

The theme of saving paper is in line with the issue of the shrinking forest area in Indonesia. The production of processed wood is suspected to have exceeded the ability and availability of wood in the forest. According to statistics released by the Ministry of Forestry in 2011, the rate of deforestation in Indonesia accelerated to 1.2 million hectares of natural forest each year in the 2000-2010 period. Although this figure has declined since 2010, the danger of deforestation still looms large, mainly due to excessive and irresponsible consumption patterns. Data from the NGO coalition "Eyes on the Forest" in Riau shows that global paper companies operating in the province have destroyed more than 2 million hectares of natural forest to supply their pulp mills.

People's frugal consumption patterns have also triggered producers in this sector to push for faster production routes, including increasing the area of land that can be extracted for timber production by violating the law, for example through licensing corruption. Unfortunately, such violations are rampant in Indonesia's forestry sector, accelerating the rate of deforestation. Data from Human Rights Watch in 2013 shows that Indonesia loses USD 2 billion annually from corruption and money laundering in the forestry sector.

Therefore #BijakKertas deserves to be one of the themes raised in the series of activities leading up to the Earth Hour 2014 event in Indonesia. In line with this year's campaign slogan, "Use Your Power!", the public is made aware of their ability to stop the erosion of forest area, one of which is caused by the excessive production of processed wood goods due to people's frugal consumption patterns. Communities in general and individuals in particular, have the power to control the production patterns of producers. If people prefer to buy products that run environmentally friendly production and are always pro-forest sustainability, then other producers will also apply the same system. The non-excessive use of products from the community as consumers will also have an impact on the production patterns of these companies so that they do not force the expansion of their production land.

#BijakKertas is a series of Earth Hour 2014 campaign, the third activity in the CFD area after the Public Transportation theme on February 16 and the #PlastikTakAsik theme on February 23. Two weeks later, on March 23, 2014 to be precise, the action will take on the theme of energy saving.