Jakarta Globe 16 Sep 14;
Jakarta. Greenpeace mourners on Monday placed funeral wreaths on burned peatland in Riau province, highlighting an ongoing crisis and urging President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to secure his “green” legacy by ensuring real peatland protection.
Speaking in a blackened landscape adjacent to Tanjung Leban village in Rokan Hilir district, locally born Greenpeace forest activist Rusmadya Maharuddin explained that data shows three quarters of Indonesia’s recent hotspots were burning in peatland.
The president’s moratorium on new forest concessions clearly does not go far enough to ensure protection for the nation’s peatlands, which store almost 60 billion tones of carbon, Rusmadya said.
“We are standing on peatland which should be protected, according to the forest clearing moratorium map. Yet clearing and draining of the wider landscape has left the land as dry as a tinderbox. Ongoing fire destruction and smoke haze are inevitable in this situation.”
Peatland drainage and conversion has released enough greenhouse gas to put Indonesia among the world’s top three emitters. This has put at risk President Yudhoyono’s commitment to the world to reduce Indonesia’s emissions by between 26 percent and 41 percent by 2020.
Unfortunately the president’s response to the peat crisis has missed the mark. The draft peat regulation awaiting his signature fails to protect peatland as an ecosystem-landscape and peat areas within existing concessions. Destroying one part of a peat dome can lead to the rapid demise of the “protected” parts through drying out and edge effects.
Yuyun Indradi, Greenpeace’s forest political campaigner, urged the president not to sign the flawed peat regulation in his last days in office.
“Indonesia’s peatland forests are dying. They need strong and comprehensive protection, but the draft peat regulation does not provide that,” Yuyun said in Jakarta.
Activists can only hope Joko Widodo will take strong actions against forest clearing.
