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For many of us, the bulk of our photographs are condemned to sit on a hard drive, slowly succumbing to bit rot.  So it’s satisfying to know at least a few of our images are warming a homesick heart.

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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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Pak-Ludo, my colleague from CARE, spent the better part of an afternoon driving me to some of the area villages outside of Kupang. It’s easy to see why people can have such difficulties making a living from farming here. The soil is rocky and shallow, and dust-dry.

[Photo: Kupang outskirts. Francesco Fiondella]

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Not surprisingly, NTT faces real development challenges, including periods of serious food insecurity. Since irrigation systems are virtually nonexistent, farmers here are almost wholly dependent on monsoon rains to supply water to their crops. But even in years of normal rainfall, the province can expect to distribute between 20 and 25 thousand tons of food aid to families. During El Niño years, which typically result in significantly less rainfall, the aid figure can be twice that. Rates of malnutrition, especially in children, can reach 25% during these periods.

Scientists at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society want to reduce these impacts by using seasonal climate forecasts to alert government authorities about periods when below-average rainfall is expected. Indonesia has a good system in place to respond to food insecurity, but the challenge is generally one of timing. From the moment a problem is declared to the moment the first shipments of rice and other aid is unloaded, half a year may pass. The hope is to give agencies and humanitarian organizations such as CARE Indonesia months of lead time to stock up on food supplies, jump-start their monitoring activities and set aside funds and other resources in case the food problems materialize.

We’ve organized a workshop for tomorrow in NTT’s capital, Kupang, with CARE Indonesia, Bogor Agriculture University (IPB) and the provincial food-security agency in order to share the latest research findings and discuss their potential use in food-security planning. This latter goal is critical. We can issue the best forecasts in the world, but if there’s no institutional system in place to understand and act on them, they’re essentially useless.

Tough climate

Understanding the NTT’s climate is critical if one is to issue reliable forecasts. In general, the climate of NTT is drier than that of other regions of Indonesia. The monsoon rains typically arrive in late October or early November and end in mid-March. Rainfall levels vary significantly from year to year, and from location to location.

While historical climate data is scarce for the region, we have enough evidence to believe that El Niño events are strongly associated with delayed monsoon rains, below-normal rainfall and poor harvests. These are the times to worry about food insecurity. As if this wasn’t bad enough, NTT is also the only part of Indonesia to get hit with cyclones.

The people of NTT have been coping with climate variability for centuries and as such have been practicing their own form of climate risk management. One way they do this is by taking advantage of the localized rainfall variability, says Shiv Someshwar, who runs the IRI’s Asia program. Those who can, own smaller parcels of land in different agro-ecological zones: a few hectares in lowland areas, some more a few kilometers away on the slope of a mountain and still some more on the mountain’s opposite slope. In other parts of Indonesia, where rainfall variability is less localized, farmers tend to own fewer, larger plots.

With help from our CARE, IPB and food-security agency colleagues, I hope to be able to tour a few villages near Kupang to see how people live and work. We can cite endless statistics and pin up scores of maps to characterize climate variability, but these will never be as compelling as the stories told to us by those directly affected. I’ve got my camera in one hand, my recorder in the other and plenty of empty cards. Let’s go!

[Information for this entry comes from a report on a workshop on climate risk management in Southeast Asia, as well as my many breakfast and dinner conversations with colleague and fellow traveler, Esther Conrad, who coordinates the IRI's Asia/Pacific program]

Photo: Market fruit, Jakarta. Francesco Fiondella

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We won’t see pavement again until we reach the edge of Kharkhorin later tonight. A huge effort is underway to rebuild the existing highway, as evidenced from the multitude of trucks and other heavy duty equipment we pass en route. This construction forces us off the paved road and onto a dirt one, which then unbraids into half a dozen roadlets that thread across the steppes. Mongolians don’t particularly care to keep to one official detour. Our driver too decides at times it is better to scour a new path across the grass than to follow the existing rutty drags.

This is a rough, beautiful country, a lost one, with a broken history and stoic people. The landscape is endless and ragged, a thin skin of grass stretched over lumps of bones. In the tucks of mountains and hills, people have set their gers, which are bright dots against the dark and enveloping grass.

At Lun, about four hours from UB and far along enough to get a pompeiian dose of dust and heat, we had decided there was no way that we could make it to Tsetserleg in one day as the other team had done. The roads won’t improve and the travel was taking a toll on both N and A. I should say, however, that I have been amazed at how well our little one is managing so far. His sleeping and eating schedule is totally whack, but he seems as wide-eyed and hilarious as usual, easily endearing himself to the Mongolians. N deserves all the credit for this, for making sure he gets full and undisturbed sleep when he needs it. That she’s still breastfeeding has also made it easier for Augú to be fed and to be comforted.

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N had spoken to G last night, who told her the drive to Tsetserleg is about 12 hours, not eight, as the group had originally estimated. “The roads are dusty, but generally in good condition,” N says, recounting G’s words. She has been taking 500 mg of Panadol every 6 hours to combat the fever and looks and sounds much better this morning. I admire her strength, for deciding to come with the kiddo to this country, for deciding to embark on a long road trip to the Mongolian bush with nary a day to recuperate from her day of fevers and chills.

Her fortitude is about to be tested, because soon the highway will end, and we’ll be forced to drive on dirt. For the next eight hours.

Although G was technically correct in his synopsis of the road conditions out of UB, I would have perhaps used a slightly more robust word than ‘dusty’. What the cars are churning up as they speed by, and as the picture here shows, is soil by the ton. Sun-blockin’, lung-fillin’, dinosaur-killin’ dust that slips into the air vents and between the window seals until it cakes you and everything else in the car. I feel like we’re in a mobile tandoori oven.

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“I wasn’t, I just took some pictures of the fence,” I say.

I hold the camera toward him and point to the display. He shuffles through the photos. For each one, he asks me where I shot it. It doesn’t help that I have been shooting with a huge telephoto lens that just screams “recon”.”This is a special building in Mongolia.”"Oh. I didn’t know. I was just taking photos for my, art.”"Hmm. You will delete the first three,” he tells me, still looking down at the display. I do.

Phew. I think I’m in the clear. I start to pack up my camera.”May I see your passport?”

Shit. Not only did I not have my passport, but I had no other form of i.d. on me. Visions of an empty chair in the middle of a dank room with one light bulb. I tell him that everything is in my hotel room. I manage to dig out a business card, explaining that we are here on a science mission, to help the people of Mongolia. He asks to keep my card. Hey man, take it. Give me a ring next time you’re in the city.”Ok?” I say.”Ok,” he says. “Welcome to Mongolia.”I walked briskly back to the hotel, unable to stop myself from checking behind me at every corner to see if I was being followed. Once back, I checked the map in my LP guide book. I had been taking pictures of the General Intelligence Service building. [see the Mongolia Maps page]

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