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Former Vice President Jusuf Kalla urged the private sector on Tuesday to do its part in protecting the environment by ensuring sustainable development.

Speaking in Jakarta at a forum on endangered species and corporate environmental responsibilities, Kalla highlighted the private sector’s role as stewards of the nation’s forests.

“We have a song here saying ‘You started it, you finish it,’ ” he said. “Destroying forests means that you destroy the environment. So everyone, no exceptions, must help Indonesia to restore its forests.

“There will be trade-offs between development and the environment. You can’t mine coal if you don’t have roads. But you can also make sure that coal companies pay higher taxes so that the government can use the money to rehabilitate the land.”

However, Kalla acknowledged that taxation alone would not fully address often complex environmental challenges.

“CSR [corporate social responsibility] must be optimized or we’re just stuck here talking at meetings at hotels like this,” he said. “The issue of orangutans is a symptom. What we’re trying to do here is not to talk about the symptom, rather why that symptom appears.”

The threat to the country’s endangered orangutan population, Kalla said, is a symptom of unchecked resource exploitation.

“Their forest is gone. The same thing with us humans, for instance, in Jakarta; if we don’t have any parks or green spaces, we too become restless,” he said. “Their lives are threatened because their habitat is disappearing.”

The director of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, Steve L. Monfort, said that around the world, the private sector contributed most to environmental degradation.

“But everyone in the society shares the same responsibility too. We all are the consumers of natural resources,” he said.

Monfort said ecosystem preservation should top Indonesia’s priorities, since the archipelago is home to some of the most impressive biodiversity on the planet.

The founder and head of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, Bungaran Saragih, said nongovernmental organizations were not solely responsible for protecting nature. “NGOs can’t do it alone,” he said. “We need cooperation from the government, the private sector and the people.”

Combining NGOs’ know-how with government’s authority and private sector funding is the only way to achieve sustainable development, said Bungaran, who was the agriculture minister from 2000 to 2004.

“All this time, it’s just pointing fingers. NGOs angry at the government, at the private sector. Everyone’s scared and no one’s working,” he said. “It has to stop.”