Tropical peatlands play an important role in the global climate system since they deposit a significant amount of terrestrial organic carbon. Indonesia contains an estimated 36% (21 million hectares) of tropical peatlands, allowing them to have a persistent carbon sink for centuries. However, since the 1980s, peatland has been drained to support dry species plantation, leading to impacts such as soil subsidence and additional CO2 emissions. From 2000 to 2010, it is estimated that Sumatra lost 41.3% of its peat swamp forest and Borneo lost 24.8%. Research shows that these major land-use changes and land degradation caused large greenhouse gas emissions, which led to international concern. To make it worse, peatland degradation also makes it prone to fire during the dry season. In 2015, peatland fires lasted for three months, burning more than 2.6 million hectares of forest, peat and other lands. This fire contributed to CO2 carbon emissions equal to 5% of the 2015 global fossil fuel emissions.
Responding to the significance of having a healthy peatland as against a degraded peatland, my study adopts a handicapped approach to understand how we should deal with a degraded peatland. Michel Callon (2008) centres the idea of handicap on the concept of agency, where an actor’s ability to perform a certain function can be approached either through an individualist approach or a collective one. The individualist approach places the responsibility to be able to perform on the handicapped actor by providing them with prosthetic resources, whereas the collective approach places the responsibility on the community through inclusive actions such as affirmative policies. However, the latter approach raises the question of what is the scale of a collective? If an unhealthy peatland has become an international concern, should the international actors also be involved in Indonesian peatland restoration activities?
To answer these questions, my research focuses on two peatland restoration projects in a village in Riau province. This village experienced a devastating peatland fire in 2015 and received peatland restoration projects from international and national institutions. The two restoration projects were designed by non-governmental organizations and the government agency following a paludiculture principle where crop plantation and other productive activities are done on wet or rewetted peatland. The principle works on the assumption that economic activities and ecological restoration can be done simultaneously.
The first project, funded by the Indonesia Climate Change Trust Fund and the United Kingdom Climate Change Unit, was aimed at supporting a women’s group in an effort to restore peatland. The project followed an individual approach where the donors appointed local representatives to provide a village women’s group with red ginger (Zingiber Officinale) rhizomes, training, and dolomite chalk to neutralize peat acidity along with the equipment to cultivate the land. In preparing the peatland for plantation, the women’s group members would loosen the peat using hoes, adding dolomite before adding the peat with coconut husk as a medium for red ginger seedlings. These prosthetic things were expected to transform the ‘handicapped’ peatland into a ‘normal’ land that is not acidic and is able to produce cash crops. While these activities succeeded in creating good soil for the red ginger to grow and produce its first harvest, they were insufficient to handle the heavy rain that led to flooding and the death of the ginger plants. Losing the red ginger to rain led the women group to shift their focus to producing red ginseng taffies instead of cultivating the ginger plants. To support the taffy production, these women would buy red gingers from the market, which made this business vulnerable to the market prices.
A villager trying to extinguish a peatland fire using a water pump in Sumatra during the September 2019 peatland fire.
The second project, funded by Indonesia’s national government, was aimed at providing economic activity for the local community through pineapple plantations in the degraded peatland. This project again followed an individualist approach where the government equipped a local group with pineapple seeds, tools, manure and payment for the cultivation. These supports were expected to compensate for the difficulties faced by the farmers in going to the degraded peatland area that was located quite far from the community’s settlement. The normalization of the handicapped peatland was strongly dependent on the project support. Once the project fund stopped, the farmers chose to end their engagement with the degraded peatland, which they describe as being of low quality and located quite far from their own pineapple plantations. This project shows that at the village level, the restoration project was being valued by the farmers based on its economic benefit and not on how it will benefit the environment. To be able to survive and to achieve the environment and economic balance, larger-scale supports are needed, either in the form of longer restoration funds or allocating specific people to the remote peatland.
The contrast between the two projects shows how both adopt an individual approach to addressing the handicapped land. Interestingly, while at the beginning of my research, by ‘handicapped’, I refer to the degraded peatland, which requires seeds and nutrients to become a normal land. During my analysis, I realized that these projects understood the local community also as ‘handicapped’ actors to normalize whom they would provide training and financial support. When the projects failed to enable either the degraded peatland or the local community to become ‘normal’, such as when the peatland was flooded or when the local community needed more effort to produce good pineapple, the relationships between the local community and degraded peatland that were initiated through the projects could no longer be sustained.
While the discontinuity of these projects implies an assertion of the local community’s agency of doing what it considers as best, degraded peatlands continue to be prone to fire. This suggests that to restore peatlands, we cannot go for a dichotomy of human intention versus nature’s reaction since it will be harmful to both. A collective approach is needed in peatland restoration projects where intervention covers not only the distribution of things but also plural voices toward sustainable practices.
Yuti Ariani Fatimah is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Asian School of the Environment, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. This blog post is based on her research on peatland restoration projects in Indonesia.