Muslim world to promote ‘green haj’ concept

Adianto P. Simamora, The Jakarta Post 6 Apr 10;

Muslim community representatives from 17 countries will hold an international conference on climate change to hash out tangible action to tackle global warming, including through the “green haj” concept.

The April 9-10 conference in Bogor will feature around 200 participants, including 90 from Islamic boarding schools across Indonesia.

“This is an action-oriented conference to motivate Muslims to protect the planet from the threat of global warming,” organizing committee member Ismet Hadad said Monday.

“We want to show the world that Muslims are also doing their part to combat climate change, which affects all people regardless of religious or ethnic background.”

The conference will be held at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture’s convention center, and will be funded in part by Conservation Inter-national.

Environment Minister Gusti Muhammad Hatta and Forestry Minister Zulkifli Hasan are expected to open the conference.

The list of speakers includes Fazlun Khalid from the London-based Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environment Science; Muhammad Hassan from Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, and Moroccan Abdelkader Allali, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The inaugural Muslim conference on climate change was held in Kuwait in 2008.

At last year’s meeting in Istanbul, the conference adopted the “Muslim seven-year action plan for climate change”.

The plan includes proposals for a more environmentally management of the annual haj, eco-friendly mosques and publishing the Koran with paper from sustainable forests.

Ahmad Fauzi, the Forestry Ministry’s liaison for the conference, said organizers expected to come up with concrete results on how to implement the proposals agreed on in Turkey.

He said one of the more ambitious targets was the “green haj”, in which haj pilgrims would be encouraged to minimize and offset their carbon footprints from the pilgrimage.

“If each of the 250,000 or so Indonesian haj pilgrims set aside US$10 toward that end, we’d have a $2.5 million fund to combat climate change,” Ahmad said.

Another measure for adoption is to phase out the use of plastic bottles throughout the haj.

“The idea is for the pilgrims to bring back an understanding of caring for creation as an act of faith,” the action plan says.

It also calls on Muslim communities to build “green mosques” through energy-saving designs.

Ahmad said the conference would help boost awareness of environmental issues among Muslims at schools and universities, and help draw up guidelines on climate change issues to be distributed among Muslim scholars.

He added the Bogor conference was unlikely to see the establishment of the planned Muslim Association for Climate Change Action (MACCA), an umbrella organization to implement the action plan to mitigate the impact from climate change.

Conservation International’s Fakhruddin Mangunjaya said the conference would declare Bogor as a green city in the Muslim world.

The conference will select 10 such green cities in the Muslim world as models for other Muslim-majority cities to aspire to.