Reducing peatland fires in Indonesian Borneo

In early August, the provincial governor of Central Kalimantan, located on the Indonesian part of Borneo Island, issued a decree that had the Asia Program folks at IRI jumping for joy. Ok, scientists at IRI aren’t really in the habit of jumping about their work. But they did get quite excited about the governor’s statement.

“The decree is a landmark document on at least two counts: it moves away from previous government approach that banned the use of fire by farmers to one of controlled burning, and, it specifically mentions the use of climate information beyond weather–both of which we advocated in our work,” says Shiv Someshwar, head of IRI’s Asia and Pacific program. “Our efforts have translated into changed policy.”

Indonesia has faced increasing pressure from other Southeast Asian countries to get its fire problem under control. In turn, it has put pressure on its provinces to act. As a result, the Central Kalimantan government banned farmers from using fires in 2006. But the strategy, sporadically enforced, imposed serious burdens on poor farming communities, who claim the ban significantly decreased their livelihoods.

Now that the ban has been lifted, tensions should ease. But challenges remain. The decree doesn’t give details on what “controlled burning” entails, which authority will monitor or oversee the burning and how exactly climate information will be incorporated into decision making. There are other issues as well, which I will get to shortly. But first, some background on the situation.

Central Kalimantan’s peatlands have undergone dramatic ecological and social change over the past decades. Transmigration programs moved families from Java and other islands to Central Kalimantan and encouraged them to convert peatland for sedentary agricultural use, as opposed to swidden, or slash-and-burn agriculture. Logging, both legal and illegal, has leveled millions of hectares of forest, while government rice-planting projects have drained large expanses of peat; both cause the spongy peat to become much drier and easier to ignite.

For generations, swidden farmers in the province and across the region have used slash-and-burn as a way to clear land and prepare it for agriculture. Burning returns nutrients to the soil and kills weeds. It’s also cheap and doesn’t require heavy amounts of labor or machinery, two critical considerations in this resource-constrained, poverty-stricken part of the world.

Plantations also have used fires as a low-cost way to clear land before planting oil palm, although legally they are no longer allowed to do this. Unlike smallholder farmers, who generally burn a few hectares at a time, the plantations were sometimes burning thousands of hectares at once.

When the fires burn out of control, they pose serious environmental and health problems for the province, country and region. They also release significant amounts of carbon dioxide in a short period of time, hindering global greenhouse-gas mitigation efforts.

Peatlands contain an enormous amount of biomass, which in paces extend to depths of 10 meters or more. Extremely dry conditions turn all this material into fire fuel–some 100,000 cubic meters in a single hectare. The fires generate enormous quantities of smoke because they can smolder deep below the surface, sometimes for months and are nearly impossible to extinguish. They can even spread laterally, underground and unseen, for kilometers before resurfacing to start new blazes.

Fires in Indonesia made worldwide headlines in 1997, when severely dry conditions caused by a strong El Niño, desiccated the peatlands. Small fires quickly erupted into massive blazes, turning millions of hectares–once rich with wildlife–into a charred and lifeless expanse. Thick haze covered much of the region, affecting some 200 million people in Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore (WHO fact sheet). The blazes and smoke caused mass evacuations, hospitalizations, the closing of airports and even ship collisions.

That year, the fires in Central Kalimantan and the rest of Indonesia released an estimated 0.8 to 2.6 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere, equal to 13-40% of the carbon released from burning fossil fuels in the entire world.

While slash-and-burn farmers received much of the blame for 1997 fires, there’s evidence to suggest (see this report) that most of those fires were started by plantation owners, industrial estates and transmigration land-clearing projects that didn’t utilize indigenous methods on the proper applications of fire.

The Climate Connection

In a normal dry season, the peatlands generally retain enough moisture to thwart any significant spreading of fire. This, coupled with the swidden farmers’ indigenous knowledge of controlling fires (by monitoring the wind and digging fire breaks, for example) often is enough to keep fires at bay.

The fire risk is high during periods of below-average rainfall, such as those caused by an El Niño (see the first figure here). Based on this knowledge, IRI, Bogor Agriculture University and CARE Indonesia have developed a free online tool which gives provincial and district authorities the necessary climate information to be able to estimate fire risk months ahead of time. Instructions are also in Indonesian.

In the Kapuas district, outside of Central Kalimantan’s capital, Palangka Raya, Shiv and Esther gave a presentation (thanks to real-time translation by our Indonesian colleague, Rilus Kinseng) on the state of the project and discussed the tool and how it could be incorporated into the district’s fire management strategy. This is the next important step if a fire early-warning system is to be effective. While climate information might help decision makers determine where and when the biggest risks are, it won’t tell them how to act on the information. That’s an altogether different challenge.

The governor’s decree is still quite fresh, so officials in Kapuas are still attempting to figure out how to fold it into their operations. One key issue they discussed with us during the meeting was what to do in times of high-risk, when burning has to be severely restricted or temporarily banned.

The authorities need to figure out ways to incentivize farmers not to burn, contributing greatly to this discussion in the coming year. Losing out on even one season of production can be devastating to some of these communities. IRI is investigating the effectiveness of a number of potential incentives for the farmers and will be contributing to the discussions in Central Kalimantan in the coming year.

The meeting was particularly eye-opening for me because it revealed how slow and methodical our work has to be in the region. Determining all the different institutions at play, the jurisdictions they have and reaching out to the appropriate individuals within them takes a lot of effort and outreach. Shiv and Esther, as well as our colleagues at IPB and CARE seem to have boundless levels of energy and patience, driving to four, five, sometimes six meetings a day to talk with stakeholders. And they were here but two months ago and again in the early part of the year. It makes me appreciate IRI’s mission all the more, seeing the action on the ground.

[Photos: (top) Farmer in Buntoi, Central Kalimantan, cutting grass. Francesco Fiondella; (bottom) NASA image of the severe fires on Borneo during the 1997 El Niño]

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