Peatland to Palm Oil Not a Good Idea

By Barrie | October 11th, 2007 | No Comments

Indonesia needs to focus on reigning in the destruction of peatland along with illegal logging if it wants to tackle climate change, says Greenpeace International. Indonesia has approximately 60 percent of the world’s peatland swamps, around 20 million hectares.

“The impact of illegal logging on climate change is huge, but we should also notice that the conversion of peatland forests into palm oil plantations has made Indonesia the third largest emitter of greenhouse gasses after China and the United States,” Sue Connor, Greenpeace International forest campaigner, told a media conference on the Greenpeace Forest Defender Camp project on Tuesday.

She said that up to 90 percent of the logging in Indonesia was illegal, threatening Indonesia’s forests, which function as carbon sinks that are needed to mitigate and adapt to global climate change according to the article in the Jakarta Post.

“Greenhouse gas emissions as a cause of climate change are mostly caused by deforestation, with the largest portion being emitted currently from the peatland forests of Kalimantan and Sumatra,” Connor said.

She added that the palm oil plantations were the main reason for the draining, burning and conversion of the peatland forests, a process which produces the greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide.

Palm oil is one of the world’s leading vegetable oil commodities and is used in many products including food, cosmetics and bio-diesel fuel, which is now in high demand.

Greenpeace launched the Forest Defender Camp project, centered in Riau province, Sumatra, in order to save the forest there, 50 percent of which is peatland. The project is aimed at drawing attention to the interrelated problems of forest destruction, palm oil plantations and climate change in advance of December’s meeting on the Kyoto Protocol in Bali.

Indonesia will host a United Nations conference of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol in December, and will discuss new global mechanisms for handling climate change and greenhouse gas emissions to supersede the Kyoto Protocol.

Executive director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia Emmy Hafild said the project was conducted in Riau to set an example of what was happening to most peatland areas in the country.

“Riau has become a haze exporter due to the government’s mismanagement in handling the peatland,” she said.

“Therefore we call on the government to commit to a regulation on conversion and destruction of the country’s peatland forests and to ensure the implementation of effective action against forest fires, because once on fire, it will be hard to extinguish,” Emmy said.

She said the government still allowed companies to convert peatland areas at a depth greater than the tolerable limit of three meters.