Indonesia Peat Fires Help Fuel Annual Choking Haze
Date: 30-Aug-07
Country: INDONESIA
Author: Adhityani Arga and Sugita Katyal
It was an ambitious idea, but fell to pieces rather soon:
Thousands of kilometres of channels dug for irrigation instead
sucked dry vast areas of cleared peatland, leaving the
combustible carbon-rich substance exposed to the hot Kalimantan
sun.
In 1997, when the country suffered one of its worst
droughts, the peatlands went up in flames, sending a choking
haze billowing across the region to Singapore, Malaysia and
southern Thailand.
Ten years on, Indonesia's peat swamp forests still burn
regularly in the dry season, often shrouding the region in
thick smoke and causing misery to millions -- and experts say
the haze problem will only get worse if the peat fires continue
to rage.
"The Mega Rice Project may have stopped, but the hot spots
remain, and fires continue along the banks," University of
Nottingham peat expert Jack Rieley told Reuters.
"The year 1997 was the worst El Nino year. There were eight
months of dry season, the water levels dropped and the peat
became very dry and fire-prone," he said on the sidelines of an
international peatland conference in the city of Yogyakarta.
Indonesia has struggled to douse the annual fires caused by
slash-and-burn land clearing methods and smouldering peat, with
the latter particularly difficult to extinguish.
The fires are episodic, but there was a huge spike during
last year's dry season, triggering fears of a repeat of the
1997-98 disaster when dry conditions linked to the El Nino
weather pattern caused the choking haze that cost the region
billions of dollars in economic losses.
FIRES THREATEN BIODIVERSITY
Researchers estimate in the past 10 years, 24 million
hectares (59 million acres) of land in Indonesia have been
affected by fire, with 30 percent of the land area on Borneo
island burnt at least once and 15 percent burnt twice.
Last year, more than 40,000 fires are estimated to have
flared up in drained peatland areas in Southeast Asia,
according to Dutch research institute Wetlands International,
emitting a cocktail of carbon dioxide, methane and some toxic
gases.
Indonesia's burning peatlands could in the long term also
destroy the biodiversity of its dense tropical peat swamp
forests, home to rare animals such as hornbills, gibbons and
the last of Asia's great apes, orangutans.
Experts estimate Indonesia has 20 million hectares (50
million acres) of dense, black tropical peat swamps, formed
when trees, roots and leaves rot, that are natural carbon
stores.
"There will be 20 million hectares of wasteland, more
poverty than ever, destruction of biodiversity and, of course,
it will be a major contribution to global warming," Marcel
Silvius, senior programme manager of Wetlands International,
told Reuters when asked what would happen if nothing was done
to save the peat forests.
Simon Husson, an orangutan expert at Cambridge University,
said the peat fires did not kill orangutans, but forced them to
shift to forests where they had to share food with other
animals.
"Within two or three years they die because of shortages of
food," Husson told Reuters. "An estimated 2,000 orangutans died
in a peat forest in Central Kalimantan as a result of the 1997
fires, and up to 10,000 are likely to have died throughout the
Mega Rice Project area."
Indonesia has pledged to halve the number of forest fires
this year, but has still to sign a 2002 regional pact to tackle
the problem.
Jakarta has vowed to ratify the ASEAN Agreement on
Transboundary Haze Pollution but it is still being studied by
parliament. It has argued extreme weather and poverty severely
limit the effectiveness of government efforts to curb the
fires.
"The major problem with peat fires is that fire burns in
the ground. It is difficult to track down the source of fire,
as it is not visible, and fire spreads very fast," said
Harjant