In Indonesia, clearing peatland releases huge amounts of carbon

Climate costs called devastating and potentially irreversible

BENTUK JAYA, Indonesia — Indonesia has been clearing tens of thousands of acres of densely vegetated peatland for farming, releasing massive amounts of carbon that had been sequestered below for centuries and destroying one of the Earth’s most effective means of storing greenhouse gases.

The country is home to as much as half the planet’s tropical peatland, a unique ecosystem scientists say is vital to averting the worst results of climate change. Government leaders have made halting efforts to protect peatlands over the last two decades, but three years ago, when the pandemic disrupted food supply chains, officials launched an ambitious land-clearance operation and in a push to expand the cultivation of crops and cut Indonesia’s reliance on expensive imports.

By transforming 2,000 to 4,000 square miles of what environmental groups say is predominantly peatland into fields of rice, corn and cassava, the government projects it will achieve self-sufficiency in food. Laws protecting forests have been amended to allow for the ongoing project. At the U.N. Climate Change Conference in November, Indonesian President Joko Widodo said his country wants to be a global supplier of agricultural products, feeding populations beyond its own.

But disrupting the peatlands comes with devastating, likely irreversible costs for the climate, say environmental experts and activists.

“To restore these vast areas of peat forest being destroyed will take years and huge investments in labor and funds,” said David Taylor, a professor of tropical environmental change at the National University of Singapore who has researched peatlands in Asia and Africa. To do it on the timeline global leaders have set for the world to achieve net-zero emissions? “Near impossible,” Taylor said.

Peatlands form in areas that are too wet for dead plants and animals to fully decompose. While peatlands make up just 3% of the Earth’s land, they store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined, according to the United Nations.

When peatlands are drained, layers of aged biomass that are exposed to oxygen-rich air decay at an accelerated rate, releasing carbon from bygone eras into the atmosphere.

Even worse, when the weather turns hot, unprotected peat dries out, becoming combustible. Already, environmental activists and villagers in Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo, say peatlands cleared by the government are fueling more-intense wildfires. Last year, according to data from Global Forest Watch, the number of fire alerts across Central Kalimantan province exceeded those of the three previous years combined.

Meanwhile, it remains unclear whether the Food Estate project will even succeed. Research shows tropical peatlands tend to be too acidic to grow crops. Indonesian environmental groups, including Pantau Gambut and WALHI, said they have documented widespread crop failures in areas targeted by the government’s project. Rice planted in some peat-rich areas has had less than a third the yield of rice planted in mineral soil, according to the groups’ analysis.

Rawanda Wandy Tuturoong, a high-ranking aide to Widodo, said the government is experimenting with ways to more effectively cultivate peatland but can’t afford to wait for a perfect solution. Global supply chains are under threat, he said, citing the coronavirus pandemic and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

“The challenge we have is real,” Tuturoong said in the capital, Jakarta. “This project needs to continue.”

Activists in other countries point to Indonesia as a cautionary tale. In 2015, huge fires across Indonesia’s degraded peatlands emitted more greenhouse gases than the entire European Union over several months, amounting to what the United Nations called “one of the worst environmental disasters of our century.”