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AKARTA: The government will test a peatland management method, called compaction, from Malaysia in a bid to prevent annual land and forest fires in peatland areas.

The Environment and Forestry Ministry said on Friday that it would test the method, introduced by Lulie Meiling, the director of the Tropical Peat Research Laboratory in Sarawak, Malaysia.

“We will try the method in West Kalimantan, North Sumatra, Riau and Palembang,” the ministry’s director of forestry product research and development center, Dwi Sudharto, said on the sidelines of a media briefing at his office.

Dwi said the government was studying the effectiveness and compatibility of the method in Indonesia and would only try the method in peatland that was not too vast.

According to Lulie, the method is ideal for Indonesia, which has peatland with high porosity, because it makes the soil more solid, preventing it from losing water quickly and making it much more resistant to fire.

She said peatland in Sarawak rarely caught fire, unlike in Indonesia, because of the compaction method, which had been used for a decade to boost the production of palm oil plantations in peatland areas in Sarawak.

The Peatland Restoration Agency (BRG) is also considering using the land compaction method.