Crown Eco Management Org Forum How an Indonesian peatland pro..
How an Indonesian peatland project is offering a new way to curb forest fires10 Years AgoPulang Pisau, Central Kalimantan. The residents of Jabiren
faced a nervous wait in October last year as fires raged in the peatlands
around their village, Jakarta Globe reported news.
“Fire stormed this area — including
that land across from here,” said Muhrizal Sarwani, the head of the
Agricultural Land Resources Agency (BBSLDP), pointing at an abandoned field
across a nearby ditch. “All other places were affected by the fire, except for
this site.”
While other tranches of land in the area — peat, mostly
— were degraded by a particularly
uncompromising fire in 2005 that laid waste to the forest covering, this
five-hectare plot is still standing. Now, the government and environmentalists
believe that the lessons learned here can be put to work at lessening the
impact of one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems — Indonesia’s
ticking carbon time bomb. The Sustainable Peatland Management project began in
2010 across five different pilot sites in the archipelago after it was proposed
by the Ministry of Agriculture and had its funding approved by the Indonesian
Climate Change trust Fund (ICCTF). Jabiren was one of the locations chosen —
the Central Kalimantan arm of the project is scheduled to run until 2014.
He puts the success of this project, so far, down to three
focuses that depart from the status quo— raising the level of the water table,
the use of peat ameliorants and inter-cropping. Fahmuddin Agus, a soil expert
with the BBSLDP, places a particular emphasis on addressing the level of water
below the ground.
“We need to keep the water table at a
level as shallow as possible,” Fahmuddin said. “If it’s too deep, more soil
will burn when fire strikes.”
Project staff installed a water gate on an edge of the ditch
encircling the site to keep the water table at a depth of between 50 and 85
centimeters, Muhrizal said. The Jabiren peat layer is around six meters deep. In
addition to fertilizers commonly used as nutrients for plants, the project used
peat ameliorants to reduce acidity — peat frequently registers around 3pH. A
level of at least 5.5pH is required for plants to grow. While the healthy water
table and use of ameliorants are largely invisible to the untrained eye, the
third factor that sets this project apart is easier to spot. In contrast to the
usual mono-cultural assembly lines, the rubber plantation columns here are
punctuated by rows of pineapple trees. In addition to making the land more
productive, intercropping makes the land less flammable.
“Planting the pineapples also means
weeding the rubber plantation, which minimizes competition for water and
nutrients between rubber trees and weeds,” Fahmuddin said. “But it also
minimizes the ‘fire bridge’ where weed grows between rubber trees, as often
happened in the conventional system.”
Probable cause
While the branches of Indonesia’s peat problem are now well
established, the roots were planted in a previous era. The New Order regime
rolled out the One Million–Hectare Peatland program in 1996 with the aim of
converting peatland in Central Kalimantan into paddy fields by draining the
ground. The project fell apart as the government failed to apply the correct
technology to allow rice — or any other plant for that matter — to grow on the
land. It succeeded only in cutting down forests and draining the soil. The
result was vast tracts of wasteland. The loss of water and the growth of brush
made the lands highly susceptible to fire. Large fires have, indeed, struck the
degraded peatlands numerous times since the failed conversion attempt. The
blazes in Jabiren in 2005 and 2012 were not without a cause.
Developing peatlands for agricultural use has the added
benefit that those who steward the land tend to look after it. Fahmuddin cites
an example on another side of the village, where the ICCTF project is being
replicated across 100 hectares of lands run by 42 farmers, who frequently
patrol the area. The replication project, beginning last year, is managed by
the Central Kalimantan office of the Agricultural Technology Assessment Agency
(BPTP), and is funded through Indonesia’s REDD+ scheme. Aside from the Jabiren
site, ICCTF is running similar sustainable peatland management projects in four
other locations in Indonesia — in Riau and Jambi (both are palm-oil projects),
West Kalimantan (corn) and Papua (sago).
Quitting smoking
Fires and unproductive agriculture are important issues at a
local level, but the issue of Indonesia’s peatlands also holds profound global
significance. Peatlands contain twice as much carbon stock as the entire forest
biomass of the world (550 gigatons of carbon). Wetlands International, a
Netherlands-based NGO focusing on wetland conservation and restoration, says
Indonesia has the dubious honor of being responsible for the highest CO2
emissions from peatlands due to logging and drainage — amounting to around 900
megatons per year.
The country’s Ministry of Environment says peat fires
contributed 25 percent of the country’s carbon emissions between 2000 and 2005,
second only to deforestation.
Reducing emissions from peat and forest destruction is the
highest priority on the government’s pledge to cut the country’s emissions by
26 percent by 2020. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono signed a presidential
regulation on this target in 2011. A 2011 study by the Ministry of Agriculture
says Indonesia has a total of 14.9 million hectares of peatlands spread across
Sumatra, Kalimantan and Papua. More than three million of these lands are
degraded because of logging, fires or failed attempts to convert them into
farms.
Environmentalists have called for tough sanctions against
those disturbing peatlands, including farmers who try to convert them into,
now-ubiquitous, palm-oil plantations. But the ICCTF and Ministry of Agriculture
have agreed that the best way to protect peatlands is by engaging local farmers
instead, by encouraging them to adopt more sustainable ways of managing the
land.
“What can we do with the more than 3
million hectares of peat shrubs?” Fahmuddin said. “As most peat shrubs are
under the influence of drainage, converting it to agriculture will almost
certainly reduce carbon emissions from fires.”
A new leaf?
A 2007 joint study by the World Bank, the British Department
for International Development (DFID) and Pelangi Energi Abdi Citra Enviro
(PEACE) — a local NGO — placed Indonesia as the world’s third-largest carbon
emitter after China and the United States, although the Indonesian government’s
own figure was less than half the size.
“When I saw the [project] proposal, I
saw it included data of emissions from peatlands,” chairwoman of the ICCTF
secretariat, Syamsidar Thamrin. “This is very useful research because we may
now learn the real situation: How much exactly are emissions released by
Indonesian peatlands.”
The project monitors other key indicators — water table
levels, carbon emissions, even the surrounding weather patterns.
“That is where we’ve got accurate
conclusions, such as at which depth we need to maintain the water table and
which treatments can reduce emissions,” Muhrizal said. “These are scientific
data and facts, not just some random guesses.”
ICCTF says it expects other institutions, be they local or
international, to replicate the sustainable peatland management in other areas.
Lastyo K. Lukito, director for environmental and social performance at the
Millenium Challenge Account – Indonesia (MCAI), a body set up jointly by the
Indonesian and US governments to support the two countries’ partnership,
applauded the project for having proven that there was a way to make degraded
peatlands economically beneficial to local farmers while at the same time
reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
“This is not exactly a new thing; I’ve
read about this kind of project before,” Lastyo said after visiting the site in
Jabiren. “But we’d never seen the proof of its success before. And [the Jabiren
project] is proof. This is something positive.”
Lastyo said MCAI would further study the project to examine
the economic benefits before deciding whether to fund any replica project. Iwan
Tricahyo Wibisono, forestry specialist at the Indonesian office of Wetlands
International, said he welcomed the project because it “optimized” the
condition of the degraded peatlands. Iwan was unsure about the merit of the
project in combating the bigger issue of greenhouse gas emissions, but
expressed hope that this form of land management could be used to preclude the
all-too-familiar site of clouds of smoke rising up from Indonesia’s forests.
“This sounds like a positive project
to me,” said Iwan. “They’re optimizing the existing conditions, allowing
farmers to benefit from that while introducing sustainable farming that can
prevent fires. We’re supportive to things like this.”
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