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'Water-based economy' key to saving peatlands
An official at the Peatland Restoration Agency (BRG) has called on researchers to find a way to develop a water-based economy as "a common ground" for private companies and other stakeholders to join forces in restoring the country's vast peatlands
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span>An official at the Peatland Restoration Agency (BRG) has called on researchers to find a way to develop a water-based economy as "a common ground" for private companies and other stakeholders to join forces in restoring the country's vast peatlands.
The BRG's research and development deputy, Haris Gunawan, made the call on Thursday, addressing dozens of researchers at a book launch and discussion organized by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).
Haris also cautioned that "the problem will not be resolved within a generation" if a common ground was not established, stressing that simple measures could have been used to restore peatlands if not for their "protracted" degradation.
Haris said that his research team and its partners had found that returning to the basic concept of maintaining the water balance was the best way of accelerating peatland restoration as a means of preventing forest fires. Maintaining the water balance would restore the hydrological functions of peatlands, which collected water during the rainy season and prevented excessive runoff to maintain a sufficient supply of water during the dry season, he said.
Achieving this objective required enforcing a landscape-scale approach to peatland restoration and management, Haris continued. This would involve dividing a peatland area into three concentric zones: an innermost zone containing the peat dome, with its high carbon and water content and conservation function, surrounded by a buffer zone of native plant species, and an outermost lagg zone of vegetation.
"However, it can be very difficult to find [these zones] in nature, because almost all of the 800 KHGs [peat hydrological units] in Indonesia are no longer structured like this," said Haris.
The Environment and Forestry Ministry's 2017 data shows that Indonesia has 865 KHGs covering 24.66 million hectares.
The BRG was formed following the deadly forest fires in 2015 and tasked with restoring degraded peatlands in seven "priority provinces" across Sumatra, Kalimantan and Papua.
The agency has identified a Total Indicative Peatland Restoration (TIPR) area of 12.9 million ha, which comprises designated areas that fall under four "restoration priority" zones: 965,000 ha designated as Post-2015-fires zone, 4.3 million ha of the protected Peat Dome Canals zone, 5.7 million ha of the protected Non-Canal Peat Dome zone and 1.8 million ha of the Peat Canal utilization zone.
The BRG has also designated 2.67 million ha in the TIPR area — two-thirds of which are plantation concessions — as "priority degraded peatlands to be restored by 2020".
The World Resources Institute Indonesia has published an expert analysis on its website that says 2 million ha out of 9 million ha of peat domes are located in Industrial Tree Concession (HTI) areas and plantations that have been left uncultivated. This poses a considerable risk, as the concessionaires’ commitment and plans to manage the protected areas remain unknown, it says.
Since concessions, plantations and community forests coexisted within KHGs, applying a landscape-scale approach to peatland restoration could prove difficult.
"The private companies, HTI concessionaires and palm oil plantation companies control a majority of KHGs, as the data shows. They are important stakeholders [...], but we need to find a way to manage peatlands by taking into account their economic value," stressed Haris.
"What we want is water-based economic development that [accommodates] peatland restoration, and once we find a way to do that, I believe that our work in peatland restoration and management is done."
CIFOR scientist Herry Purnomo, who is also a professor at the Bogor Agricultural University, said that economies of scale also applied to local communities, which had contributed significantly to restoring about 30 percent of the BRG's restoration priority areas outside concessions.
"The companies and communities both have their share of responsibility," Herry said during the discussion on Thursday, emphasizing that restoring peatlands and preventing forest fires required "all concerned parties" to work together and "help each other".
Moving local communities away from the slash-and-burn method of clearing land would require large resources that they could not provide on their own, Herry said, and that this presented an opportunity for the private sector.
"Communities need investors, and they can be private companies that also need to invest in communal lands," he said.
Forestry lecturer Nurul Qomar of the University of Riau said that his research in Dompas, Riau, had found that the local people resorted to clearing land by burning primarily because it was easier, faster and more affordable compared to other methods.
Nurul said that the slash-and-burn method only cost about Rp 1 million (US$74) per hectare and required only two to five workers per day to clear a hectare of land.
In contrast, using land clearing equipment cost Rp 7 million per hectare and required one to three workers per day per hectare. Meanwhile, the recommended alternative of tree slashing (without burning) cost Rp 6.3 million per hectare and required 30 to 40 workers per day per hectare.
"A cost benefit analysis is needed so the communities will realize that even though the alternatives might [cost more], they will benefit from the methods," he said.
