T

he National Peatland Restoration Agency (BRG) claims it has successfully restored more peatland nationwide in 2018 compared with last year.

As a country that has been struggling to overcome the issue of annual wildfires, Indonesia has set an ambitious target of restoring and rewetting 2.49 million hectares of critical peatland by 2020, of which 1.4 ha is located on concession land.

Wildfires, most of which occur in dried-out peatland, have long caused health and safety concerns in the country. The annual problem has also resulted in frequent diplomatic rows with Indonesia’s neighbors as a result of haze caused by the fires.

The BRG’s education deputy for campaigns, participation and partnership Myrna A. Safitri said the agency managed to restore 480,171 ha of peatland this year through peat soil rewetting and a village empowerment program to raise villagers’ awareness in restoration-targeted areas.

“This is a significant increase compared with our achievement last year when we were only able to restore 198,695 hectares of peatland,” Myrna said Friday. “To restore the peatland in the non-concession areas, we performed peat soil rewetting by blocking canals.”

She said the agency managed to restore 640,947 hectares of peatland from 2016 to 2018.

As for the damaged peatland in the concession areas, Myrna said the responsibility for restoring peatland fell to the concession owners.

The BRG, in this case, has provided supervision or technical assistance for a number of plantation companies since the agency was established in early 2016.

An example of a successful restoration program in 2018 is to be found in South Sumatra, where the local peat restoration task force said it had managed to restore about 70 percent of its target of 615,000 ha since 2016.

South Sumatra’s Regional Peat Restoration Team (TRGD) coordinator Najib Asmani said his team had built facilities to rewet the peat, including boreholes and by blocking open canals in order to stop the drainage of peat forests. The team has also implemented a peatland village program. All of the efforts are regulated in a bylaw on the protection and management of peat ecosystems and a gubernatorial regulation — two legal guidelines they described as “breakthroughs” since 2016.

“We wanted to make sure that peat restoration was implemented not only because we hosted international events like the 2018 Asian Games, but because of the environmental needs,” Najib said during a meeting to discuss the progress of the province’s peatland restoration on Wednesday in Palembang.

The year 2015 saw the nation’s worst-ever haze crisis, with fires ravaging 640,000 ha of forest and peatland in South Sumatra alone. In the aftermath of the 2015 fires, peat restoration has been centered on seven provinces across the country, including South Sumatra and West Kalimantan.

West Kalimantan TRGD secretary Fiera Budiarsya Arief, who attended the discussion in Palembang, said the political support in the form of bylaws in South Sumatra had helped the region to advance its peat-restoration
campaign.

“The lesson we learned from South Sumatra is that it had bylaws [supporting peat restoration],” Fiera said, adding that his team would soon propose similar bylaws to strengthen the existing gubernatorial regulation on peatland restoration.

Researcher Yusuf Bahtimi of the Center for International Forestry Research said that bintaro, nyemplung and bintagur plants could be alternative crops for oil palm in South Sumatra, which could be grown in peatlands.

“We’re currently testing [the crops] in peatland in Perigi village, Ogan Komering Ilir district,” he said, adding that these plants could also help in the restoration of the degraded areas.