And with Sweden’s Greta Thunberg and the topic of climate change reaching critical mass at last week’s United Nations-led Climate Action Summit, there is a need for Indonesia to improve its business climate to attract more “green” investments, envoys from the region have said.

The eco-friendly northern Europeans have welcomed the Indonesian public’s growing interest in the culture of sustainability, which has become particularly apparent among urban youth. But there is “more to be done” in promoting awareness about more issues like sustainable energy funding and the lack of political will to shift away from oil and gas, Denmark’s envoy said.

“Sometimes we have a feeling that Indonesian people look at the Nordic countries and how we have done nice things – which is good to replicate – but they also think that what we have done must have been very expensive and therefore [not affordable],” said Rasmus A. Kristensen, the Danish ambassador to Indonesia, in a limited interview with local media last week.

Together with his counterparts Finnish Ambassador Jari Sinkari, Norwegian Ambassador Vegard Kaale and Swedish Ambassador Marina Berg, Kristensen made an impassioned call for sustainability and climate change awareness ahead of this year’s Nordic Day celebrations, an event commemorating the national days of the four countries in Jakarta.

He said that while it was true that Nordic countries had switched to more sustainable practices by employing very costly and experimental technologies at the time, he insisted that prices had quickly gone down over the years.

“Most of them are cheaper than fossil fuels. But that realization has not really dawned in Indonesia, where politicians are still saying that it's a trade-off between affordability and sustainability,” Kristensen said on Thursday.

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