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ON WARMING, PEAT IS THE ŒELEPHANT IN THE ROOM¹
INDONESIA'S PEATLANDS WREAK AS MUCH DAMAGE AS ALL THE VEHICLES IN THE U.S.
Washington Post
November 19, 2009

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34035624/ns/world_news-washington_post/

TARUNA JAYA, INDONESIA - Across a patch of pineapples shrouded in smoke,
Idris Hadrianyani battled a menace that has left his family sleepless and
sick -- and has wrought as much damage on the planet as has exhaust from all
the cars and trucks in the United States. Against the advancing flames, he
waved a hose with a handmade nozzle confected from a plastic soda bottle.

The lopsided struggle is part of a battle against one of the biggest, and
most overlooked, causes of global climate change: a vast and often
smoldering layer of coal-black peat that has made Indonesia the world's
third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the United States.

Unlike the noxious gases pumped into the atmosphere by gas-guzzling
sport-utility vehicles in the United States and smoke-belching factories in
China, danger here in the heart of Borneo rises from the ground itself.

Peat, formed over thousands of years from decomposed trees, grass and scrub,
contains gigantic quantities of carbon dioxide, which used to stay locked in
the ground. It is now drying and disintegrating, as once-soggy swamps are
shorn of trees and drained by canals, and when it burns, carbon dioxide
gushes into the atmosphere.

Amid often-acrimonious debate over how to curb global warming ahead of a
critical U.N. conference next month in Copenhagen, "peat is the big elephant
in the room," said Agus Purnomo, head of Indonesia's National Council on
Climate Change. Dealing with it, he said, requires that the world answer a
vexing question: How can protection of the environment be made as
economically rewarding as its often lucrative destruction?

Carbon trading was meant to do just that by allowing developing countries
that cut their emissions to sell carbon credits. But this and other
incentives for conservation developed since a U.N. conference in Kyoto,
Japan, in 1997 have done nothing to protect Indonesia's abused peatlands.

Dwindling forestland
Less than a quarter of a century ago, 75 percent of Kalimantan -- which
comprises three Indonesian regions on the island of Borneo -- was covered in
thick forests. Gnawed away since by loggers, oil palm plantations and
grandiose state projects, the forests have since shrunk by about half. Each
year, Indonesia loses forest area roughly the size of Connecticut.

Fires, meanwhile, have grown more frequent and serious. For centuries,
Kalimantan locals have burned forestland to create plots for farming. But
what used to be small, controlled fires have become fearsome conflagrations
as dry and degraded peat goes up in smoke.

Estimating carbon emissions from deforested peatland is a highly complicated
and inexact science. Even when not burning, dried peat leaks a slow but
steady stream of carbon dioxide and other gases. Once it catches fire, the
stream becomes a torrent.

In 2006, according to Wetlands International, a Dutch research and lobbying
group, Indonesia's peatlands released roughly 1.9 billion metric tons of
carbon dioxide -- equal to the combined emissions that year of Germany,
Britain and Canada, and more than U.S. emissions from road and air travel.
When particularly bad fires raged across Kalimantan in 1997, according to a
study led by a British scientist, the amount was up to four times as high --
more than the total emissions by the United States in that period.

Economics vs. ecology
How dirt became so dangerous -- and why reversing the damage is so difficult
-- is on grim display here in Central Kalimantan, inhabited by about 2
million people and a rapidly dwindling population of orangutans. Economic
logic here is firmly on the side of those wrecking the environment.

For example, Hadrianyani, the firefighter in Taruna Jaya, also has another
job: He clears peatland of trees and scrub for cultivation -- a task done
most easily by burning. That work earns him about $8 a day -- twice what he
gets for putting out fires.

Across Kalimantan, logging and palm oil companies deploy formidable
economic, and real, firepower against environmental activists trying to
protect the fragile peat. On a recent afternoon in Lamunti, a desolate
Central Kalimantan settlement crisscrossed with fetid canals, the rival
camps faced off. On one side of a wooden barrier at the entrance to PT
Globalindo Agung Lestari, an oil palm estate, stood a dozen or so
out-of-town environmental activists with a bullhorn. On the other side stood
company security guards, local police officers and Indonesian soldiers with
automatic weapons.

Villagers, though angry at the plantation, stayed away: They didn't want to
lose their jobs tending oil palm. The pay is about $3 a day and the work is
backbreaking, but "when you don't have anything, you have to support the
company," said Budi, 21, who, like many Indonesians, uses one name.

Interviewed away from the company's compound, villagers accused its managers
of stealing their land. The village chief, Syahrani, said he was trying to
get compensation but didn't hold out much hope. Globalindo's bosses "have
all the power. They control everything," he said. Of the 600 working-age
people in his village, 75 percent work at Globalindo. Acting estate manager
Karel Yoseph Rauy declined to comment on allegations that his company had
pilfered land.

The uneven match of reality and good intentions has put Central Kalimantan's
government in a bind. "The carbon here is huge. It should be safeguarded
like Fort Knox," said Humda Pontas, the Maine-educated head of the economics
department at the regional planning board. But palm plantations, though a
serious threat to carbon-rich peatland, "are the only real investment
opportunity. They employ people" and pay taxes. The rest, he said, "is just
theory."

'Mega rice' disaster
The deforestation of Kalimantan began with loggers. Then, in 1995,
Indonesia's authoritarian ruler, Suharto, launched a plan to turn nearly 2.5
million acres of peatland -- about twice the size of Delaware -- into a rice
farm. Thousands of workers were shipped in to dig canals and drain swamps.

Suwido Limin, a local scientist, protested that the plan would never work.
The government dismissed him as a communist.

Suharto's "mega rice" project turned out to be a disastrous flop. "It was
supposed to produce rice. It just produced haze," said Limin, who runs a
peat research center and has joined with American bank J.P. Morgan to
develop a project to fight peatland fires -- and earn money from carbon
credits.

A year after Suharto fell from power in 1998, Jakarta pulled the plug on his
rice folly. Since then, Indonesian and foreign experts have struggled to
figure out how to repair the damage. An Indonesian-Dutch plan to
rehabilitate the area put the price tag at about $700 million.

The hope is that a big chunk of this might come from carbon trading if
delegates at next month's Copenhagen conference agree to expand the system
of conservation incentives to cover peatlands. The Indonesian-Dutch plan
calculates that emissions reductions in the former mega-rice zone could
fetch $50 million to $100 million a year on the global carbon market.

Agustin Teras Narang, governor of Central Kalimantan, likes the idea of
earning big money from his region's vast peatland vault of carbon dioxide.
But, with no sign of peat turning into a profit center anytime soon, the
governor's big concern is getting Jakarta to let him turn more of Central
Kalimantan's forests over to production -- primarily rubber and oil palm
plantations.

When fires raced across his territory in September, Narang had seven
firetrucks to cover an area bigger than Virginia and Maryland combined.

Schools shut down, the airport closed, and hospitals struggled to cope with
thousands of patients suffering from respiratory problems.

Research camp razed
The fires also delivered a devastating blow to Limin, the peat researcher.
Flames reduced his research camp to charcoal. Charred sardine cans, an
incinerated bicycle and shattered glass now litter an apocalyptic landscape
of smoldering peat and uprooted trees.

Before the fires started, Limin was working on a big experimental project to
reduce fire risk and thus carbon emissions. Financing was to come largely
from J.P. Morgan's ClimateCare unit, headed by British engineer Mike Mason,
a prominent Oxford-based climate entrepreneur. Mason took the firefighting
project to a U.N. climate committee in Germany that reviews
emission-reductions ventures and decides whether they might qualify to earn
carbon credits.

In June, the committee rejected the proposal, arguing that peat fires are a
natural phenomenon and, therefore, are not eligible. (Most experts disagree
and say the fires are not natural.) Limin put his ambitious firefighting
plans on hold. When flames advanced on his forest encampment in September,
he had just a couple of dozen men to battle them. After days of struggle,
they retreated.

Shortly after his camp was gobbled up, Limin stood near a table on which a
police-band radio crackled with reports from the forest of yet more flames.
He groaned. Saving peat and the planet, Limin said, requires that people get
paid: "Who will work without pay? Nobody."

............

NHNE's Climate Change Resource Page:
http://www.nhne.org/tabid/490/Default.aspx

NHNE's 1000 Most Recent Climate Change Articles:
http://www.nhne.org/tabid/1050/Default.aspx

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Published by David Sunfellow
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