Renaturing 15 m² of peat bog rainforest on Borneo

In the 1990s, the Indonesian government planned a mega rice project in Kalimantan. Kilometers of drainage canals were built to drain a million hectares of peatland and grow rice there (Suyanto et al, 2009). The project failed - but the peat bog was destroyed. Dry peat bog is a fire hazard. It is highly flammable and burns deep in the soil. This makes fires almost impossible to extinguish, especially in the dry season. In addition, the CO₂ content of peat bog is up to ten times higher than that of normal soil. Peat fires are therefore very harmful to the climate. The catastrophic fires of 2015 destroyed 2.6 million hectares of forest in Indonesia and released 1.75 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent - almost three times the regular annual emissions of all of Indonesia. In 2015, the country was ranked fifth among the world's CO₂ emitters (Buttler, 2015). The main reason was forest fires, especially peatland fires. Intact peatland in Indonesia is covered by rainforest and thus protected. Clearing and draining peatland for agricultural purposes destroys the natural balance. And peatland that has burned once is very likely to burn again (FAO, 2022). People, flora and fauna suffer. In addition to financial losses for the local population, the long-term health damage to humans and animals is immense. In orangutans, for example, a breakdown of fatty tissue and high levels of stress hormones were observed during the fires. Since the fires affect the availability of food in the long term, they can also have an impact on species survival in subsequent years (Erb et al., 2018). There is a solution to avoid forest fires in the future: the renaturation of the peatlands.