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nder President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s leadership, the government has ramped up efforts to save peatland across the country, but a lack of public monitoring might hinder such initiatives, prompting some NGOs to develop a website aimed at providing a platform for the public to track the progress of various peatland restoration programs.

Teaming up with some other environmental groups like the Madani Foundation for Sustainability, the independent research body, World Resources Institute (WRI) Indonesia, has been working on the pantaugambut.id website, which just went live on Monday.

The new website, which is expected to be fully running by late this year, will contain the WRI’s analysis of the government’s commitment to restore 2 million hectares of peatland by 2020, which was outlined in several new regulations.

“If we find no progress on each commitment, we could suggest solutions to the government,” said Almo Pradana, WRI’s peatland restoration project manager, during a pre-launch event for the portal on Monday.

Several regulations and attempts, both by central and regional administrations, have been done to fulfill the government’s target of restoring 2 million ha. For instance, Jokowi issued in 2015 a moratorium on the issuance of permits for primary forests and peatland.

The WRI said the new website will also provide a space for people to share their stories, personal experiences, or even ideas about peatland restoration in the country, where peat fires continue to be an annual problem.

Anton Widjaya, a director in the Indonesian Forum for the Environment’s (Walhi) West Kalimantan office, said such experience sharing would provide opportunities for people to have their voices heard by policy makers.

“We hope that our stories can be read by or told to the government, so we know that our voices can reach them,” Anton said. “We’d also like to know whether the government has responded to our stories.”

The website will also present a visual map of peatland and the restoration projects across the country, in which peatland mapping continues to be one of problems hindering the restoration campaign, with several institutions having gone through a long debate about the mapping mechanism with minimum results.

However, Almo expressed optimism, saying that his office was working with the Peatland Restoration Agency (BRG) on the map.

“We will work on the visualization of projects done by the agency [to ensure a user-friendly design],” Almo added.

The WRI will also include basic knowledge about peatland on the website to allow visitors to easily learn about the threatened land.

“We made the website to connect the missing links, in which there are people with political power who have no idea about peatland and its restoration and people living in peatland regions with no power to tell the government,” Almo said.

Zulfikar Mardiyadi, the coordinator of the MRV REDD+ team in Papua, said the thought public empowerment through such an online platform would represent good progress for the whole country’s peatland campaign.

“People should be the ones who do it. This should be a good attempt to include citizens in the project,” Zulfikar said, adding that the restoration would not succeed without public participation. (kuk)