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Peatland restoration on concession areas remain half-hearted, study finds
The failure to restore degraded peatland by concession owners will increase the risk of forest and peatland fires in the future.
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This undated photo shows men standing near a pond in Orang Kayo Hitam Forest Park (Tahura OKH) in Jambi, which needs to be restored after a blaze in 2015. (JP/Syafrizaldi)
W
hen the last embers of the 2015 forest and peatland fires were extinguished, the government immediately urged all relevant stakeholders, including in the private sector, to restore degraded peatland across the country to prevent a similar catastrophe from happening in the future.
The 2015 wildfires raged through around 2.6 million hectares of land in Sumatra and Kalimantan, costing the country more than US$16 billion. Haze from the fires reached the neighboring countries of Malaysia and Singapore and caused health problems for tens of thousands of people.
While most of the country’s peatland is located on concession lands, a recent study published by an environmental group has revealed that most owners have not properly restored the wetlands across the country, despite being obliged to do so.
In a study published in late May, environmental group Pantau Gambut examined a total of 1,222 peatland areas in which wildfires occurred between 2015 and 2019 on 43 concession areas spread across seven provinces.
According to the group, around 5.2 million ha, 39 percent, of the 13.4 million ha of Indonesia’s peatland are located within forest and plantation concession areas.
Read also: Indonesia faces gigantic task of restoring peatland destroyed by fire
The group found during a field observation of 355 areas that most of them had no restoration infrastructure such as canals, dams or deep wells. Meanwhile, only about 2 percent had restoration infrastructure in good condition.
