Destruction of Javan peat swamp forests "ticking time bomb" (Feature)

By Christiane Oelrich Dec 20, 2009, 2:08 GMT

Palangkaraya, Indonesia - The tree planting puzzles Rosidah Gandhi.

Sitting in front of her hut in Kelurahan Kameloh Baru, in the southern part of the island of Borneo, the 33-year-old Indonesian gestures toward the barren land. Factories should be there, she said. Or oil palm plantations. Anything that brought jobs.

Instead, environmentalists are reforesting the land in a desperate attempt to brake the release of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2), a leading cause of global warming, by decomposing peat.

'Clearing peat swamp forests is a ticking time bomb for the climate,' remarked Guenola Kahlert, a forests and climate expert for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Their soil holds 50 times more carbon than that in other types of rainforests. When trees are felled, the soil dries out. Layers of organic matter accumulated over millennia begin to degrade rapidly and oxidize, allowing huge amounts of CO2 to escape into the atmosphere.

If destruction of the forests continues at the present pace, they will be gone by 2020. Peatlands in the Indonesian province of Central Kalimantan sequester an estimated 6.4 gigatons of CO2, 23 times more than Germany's yearly emissions of the gas.

Gandhi and her family live alongside the abandoned Mega Rice Project (MRP). 'We moved here because they built the road, there's electricity and there was supposed to be work,' she said.

Initiated in 1996 by Indonesia's then dictator, Suharto, the MRP aimed to turn 1 million hectares of peat swamp forests between Palangkaraya and Banjarmasin into rice paddies. The project was doomed because the soil is too acidic and nutrient-poor for rice.

Especially damaging are 4,000 kilometres of canals dug for removal of the trees. Water in the peat, normally just a few centimetres below the surface, now flows into the canals continuously. The peat is drying out and catches fire during droughts, setting tons of CO2 free.

'It's one of the most disastrous offences against the environment ever committed worldwide,' said Zulfira Warta of the WWF's Indonesia branch.

The gigantic area is practically fallow. Hardly anything grows without fertilizer, and even oil palm plantations would be costly. Reviving the land is an enormous task, but barring rescue efforts, the peat will increasingly decompose and spew CO2 into the atmosphere.

Before trees can be planted, the water table must be raised. Progress is excruciatingly slow. Groundwater has been raised sufficiently in just 50,000 of the one million hectares cleared. About 1,000 hectares have been reforested.

The difficulty in restoring the unique ecosystem is evident in nearby Sebangau National Park, which lies between the Katingan and Sebangau rivers. There, too, canals slice through the 600,000-hectare peat swamp forest. Fifteen companies logged in the forest for years before it was designated a national park in 2004.

WWF worker Adventus Panda is trying to reduce drainage with the help of 50 local men. 'Five of us need three days to build a dam,' he said standing at Canal 21, which is 10 kilometres long and a metre wide.

Results of 10 months of work are spectacular. In front of the dam are charred tree stumps and scorched peat from fires during the last drought. Behind it, the landscape is luxuriantly green. Groundwater behind the dam has risen 40 to 60 centimetres, Panda said. In all, Canal 21 is constricted by eight dams at 100-metre intervals.

If all goes according to plan, the water table should be back to normal within five years. This, environmentalists say, will help to cut CO2 emissions by 1 million tons annually.

Environmentalists learned long ago that projects succeed only when the local population is engaged. There are 46 villages with a total of 62,000 inhabitants around Sebangau National Park. Many villagers earned a good living for years as loggers. To win their support for forest conservation, they must be given another source of livelihood.

This is why oil palm plantations, which many environmentalists detest, are not necessarily a bad thing. Europe's enthusiasm for biofuels, since cooled, sparked a plantation boom in the region in recent years.

'It's true that oil palm plantations are now the chief cause of deforestation,' the WWF's Warta said. 'But if palm oil is boycotted in Europe, it will set off a chain reaction that's not helpful to us. People will lose their jobs and incomes, and go back into the forest to cut down valuable trees.

'The best thing is to insist on sustainable oil palm plantations.'