A climate threat, rising from the soil - washingtonpost.com

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By Andrew Higgins
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 19, 2009

TARUNA JAYA, INDONESIA -- Across a patch of pineapples shrouded in smoke, Idris Hadrianyani battled a menace that has left his family sleepless and sick -- and has wrought as much damage on the planet as has exhaust from all the cars and trucks in the United States. Against the advancing flames, he waved a hose with a handmade nozzle confected from a plastic soda bottle.

The lopsided struggle is part of a battle against one of the biggest, and most overlooked, causes of global climate change: a vast and often smoldering layer of coal-black peat that has made Indonesia the world's third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the United States.

Unlike the noxious gases pumped into the atmosphere by gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles in the United States and smoke-belching factories in China, danger here in the heart of Borneo rises from the ground itself.

Peat, formed over thousands of years from decomposed trees, grass and scrub, contains gigantic quantities of carbon dioxide, which used to stay locked in the ground. It is now drying and disintegrating, as once-soggy swamps are shorn of trees and drained by canals, and when it burns, carbon dioxide gushes into the atmosphere.

Amid often-acrimonious debate over how to curb global warming ahead of a critical U.N. conference next month in Copenhagen, "peat is the big elephant in the room," said Agus Purnomo, head of Indonesia's National Council on Climate Change. Dealing with it, he said, requires that the world answer a vexing question: How can protection of the environment be made as economically rewarding as its often lucrative destruction?

Carbon trading was meant to do just that by allowing developing countries that cut their emissions to sell carbon credits. But this and other incentives for conservation developed since a U.N. conference in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 have done nothing to protect Indonesia's abused peatlands.

Dwindling forestland

Less than a quarter of a century ago, 75 percent of Kalimantan -- which comprises three Indonesian regions on the island of Borneo -- was covered in thick forests. Gnawed away since by loggers, oil palm plantations and grandiose state projects, the forests have since shrunk by about half. Each year, Indonesia loses forest area roughly the size of Connecticut.

Fires, meanwhile, have grown more frequent and serious. For centuries, Kalimantan locals have burned forestland to create plots for farming. But what used to be small, controlled fires have become fearsome conflagrations as dry and degraded peat goes up in smoke.

Estimating carbon emissions from deforested peatland is a highly complicated and inexact science. Even when not burning, dried peat leaks a slow but steady stream of carbon dioxide and other gases. Once it catches fire, the stream becomes a torrent.

In 2006, according to Wetlands International, a Dutch research and lobbying group, Indonesia's peatlands released roughly 1.9 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide -- equal to the combined emissions that year of Germany, Britain and Canada, and more than U.S. emissions from road and air travel. When particularly bad fires raged across Kalimantan in 1997, according to a study led by a British scientist, the amount was up to four times as high -- more than the total emissions by the United States in that period.

Economics vs. ecology

How dirt became so dangerous -- and why reversing the damage is so difficult -- is on grim display here in Central Kalimantan, inhabited by about 2 million people and a rapidly dwindling population of orangutans. Economic logic here is firmly on the side of those wrecking the environment.

For example, Hadrianyani, the firefighter in Taruna Jaya, also has another job: He clears peatland of trees and scrub for cultivation -- a task done most easily by burning. That work earns him about $8 a day -- twice what he gets for putting out fires.

Across Kalimantan, logging and palm oil companies deploy formidable economic, and real, firepower against environmental activists trying to protect the fragile peat. On a recent afternoon in Lamunti, a desolate Central Kalimantan settlement crisscrossed with fetid canals, the rival camps faced off. On one side of a wooden barrier at the entrance to PT Globalindo Agung Lestari, an oil palm estate, stood a dozen or so out-of-town environmental activists with a bullhorn. On the other side stood company security guards, local police officers and Indonesian soldiers with automatic weapons.

Villagers, though angry at the plantation, stayed away: They didn't want to lose their jobs tending oil palm. The pay is about $3 a day and the work is backbreaking, but "when you don't have anything, you have to support the company," said Budi, 21, who, like many Indonesians, uses one name.

Interviewed away from the company's compound, villagers accused its managers of stealing their land. The village chief, Syahrani, said he was trying to get compensation but didn't hold out much hope. Globalindo's bosses "have all the power. They control everything," he said. Of the 600 working-age people in his village, 75 percent work at Globalindo. Acting estate manager Karel Yoseph Rauy declined to comment on allegations that his company had pilfered land.

The uneven match of reality and good intentions has put Central Kalimantan's government in a bind. "The carbon here is huge. It should be safeguarded like Fort Knox," said Humda Pontas, the Maine-educated head of the economics department at the regional planning board. But palm plantations, though a serious threat to carbon-rich peatland, "are the only real investment opportunity. They employ people" and pay taxes. The rest, he said, "is just theory."

'Mega rice' disaster

The deforestation of Kalimantan began with loggers. Then, in 1995, Indonesia's authoritarian ruler, Suharto, launched a plan to turn nearly 2.5 million acres of peatland -- about twice the size of Delaware -- into a rice farm. Thousands of workers were shipped in to dig canals and drain swamps.

Suwido Limin, a local scientist, protested that the plan would never work. The government dismissed him as a communist.

Suharto's "mega rice" project turned out to be a disastrous flop. "It was supposed to produce rice. It just produced haze," said Limin, who runs a peat research center and has joined with American bank J.P. Morgan to develop a project to fight peatland fires -- and earn money from carbon credits.

A year after Suharto fell from power in 1998, Jakarta pulled the plug on his rice folly. Since then, Indonesian and foreign experts have struggled to figure out how to repair the damage. An Indonesian-Dutch plan to rehabilitate the area put the price tag at about $700 million.

The hope is that a big chunk of this might come from carbon trading if delegates at next month's Copenhagen conference agree to expand the system of conservation incentives to cover peatlands. The Indonesian-Dutch plan calculates that emissions reductions in the former mega-rice zone could fetch $50 million to $100 million a year on the global carbon market.

Agustin Teras Narang, governor of Central Kalimantan, likes the idea of earning big money from his region's vast peatland vault of carbon dioxide. But, with no sign of peat turning into a profit center anytime soon, the governor's big concern is getting Jakarta to let him turn more of Central Kalimantan's forests over to production -- primarily rubber and oil palm plantations.

When fires raced across his territory in September, Narang had seven firetrucks to cover an area bigger than Virginia and Maryland combined.

Schools shut down, the airport closed, and hospitals struggled to cope with thousands of patients suffering from respiratory problems.

Research camp razed

The fires also delivered a devastating blow to Limin, the peat researcher. Flames reduced his research camp to charcoal. Charred sardine cans, an incinerated bicycle and shattered glass now litter an apocalyptic landscape of smoldering peat and uprooted trees.

Before the fires started, Limin was working on a big experimental project to reduce fire risk and thus carbon emissions. Financing was to come largely from J.P. Morgan's ClimateCare unit, headed by British engineer Mike Mason, a prominent Oxford-based climate entrepreneur. Mason took the firefighting project to a U.N. climate committee in Germany that reviews emission-reductions ventures and decides whether they might qualify to earn carbon credits.

In June, the committee rejected the proposal, arguing that peat fires are a natural phenomenon and, therefore, are not eligible. (Most experts disagree and say the fires are not natural.) Limin put his ambitious firefighting plans on hold. When flames advanced on his forest encampment in September, he had just a couple of dozen men to battle them. After days of struggle, they retreated.

Shortly after his camp was gobbled up, Limin stood near a table on which a police-band radio crackled with reports from the forest of yet more flames. He groaned. Saving peat and the planet, Limin said, requires that people get paid: "Who will work without pay? Nobody."

Rescuer plans to return tame orangutans to Borneo's wild - washingtonpost.com

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A rehabilitator plans to start releasing rescued orangutans back into Borneo's forests. But there are concerns whether the tamed apes will survive out there.

By Andrew Higgins
Saturday, November 14, 2009

PALANGKA RAYA, INDONESIA -- Over the past decade, Lone Droescher-Nielsen, a former Scandinavian Airlines Systems flight attendant, has saved nearly 600 orphaned orangutans in Borneo from almost certain death. Funded by donations from abroad, she has given the apes food, shelter and better health care than many humans in these parts ever get.

Now, the 46-year-old Dane is preparing for a more difficult -- and controversial -- task: returning tame orangutans to the wild. "They were born wild, and they deserve to go back in the wild again," said Droescher-Nielsen, founder and director of the Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Rehabilitation and Rescue Project. "That is our ultimate objective."

Early next year, if all goes according to plan, she'll release a first batch of about 75 rehabilitated orangutans into a remote forest in Central Kalimantan, an Indonesian province on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo. Tiny radio transmitters placed under their skin will monitor their movements -- and help answer a big question: Can the animals survive?

Some experts wonder whether orangutans raised by humans will be able to hack life in the forest and whether diseases they might have caught in captivity will harm kin that never left the jungle.

Droescher-Nielsen, whose 10-year-old project has grown into the world's largest primate rescue effort, expects most to make it. "The ones we set free are not going to be wild, but they can manage," she said.

It will take a couple of generations for bad habits picked up in captivity to be completely purged. Disease, she added, shouldn't be a problem because the area selected for the trial release doesn't have a viable orangutan community of its own.

The orangutan -- which means "man of the forest" in a local language -- is one of mankind's closest cousins in the animal kingdom, sharing about 97 percent of its DNA with humans. But it has suffered catastrophically from contact with man.

A century ago, Borneo had more than 300,000 wild orangutans. Today, the number has fallen to about 50,000, most of which live in Central Kalimantan. They could vanish if forests keep getting chopped down at the current rate of what Indonesian environmentalists say equals the size of six football fields every minute. Palm oil plantations, which have expanded rapidly in recent years as demand for the cheap oil surged, have led to an even bigger influx of baby apes at the rescue center.

Droescher-Nielsen initially hoped to start returning orangutans to the wild years ago, but, as forests kept retreating, it became increasingly difficult to find a safe place to put them. The task was further complicated by the fact that rehabilitated apes don't fear humans -- a big problem when many humans see them as a menace and want them dead.

Keeping orangutans fed and sheltered is expensive. The Nyaru Menteng project has a staff of about 200 people. Salaries, food, medicines and other expenses mean that it costs about $2,000 a year for each of the nearly 600 apes in residence. That is more than twice the average annual income in the area. An additional 400 or so of the primates are being cared for in other rehabilitation centers in Borneo.

"I'd like to be an orangutan," joked Nordin, a local environmental activist, who like many Indonesians uses one name. "They get given meals, and when they get sick they get sent to hospital."

Droescher-Nielsen's center has a well-equipped clinic. Adult orangutans spend much of the day in a nearby peat-land forest that is off-limits to loggers and oil palm growers. Each afternoon, dozens come out of the trees for a "social hour" in the main compound. They munch fruit, climb on a jungle gym and play on swings. At night, they are escorted to a cluster of cages; the younger primates are piled into wheelbarrows and taken to a separate sleeping area.

To survive in the wild, the orangutans will have to forget their pampered past lifestyle. Droescher-Nielsen's staff members have devised a number of techniques to try to help prepare the animals for life on their own in the forest. About 125 apes, for example, have been moved onto islands in a nearby river, where they have little contact with humans. Most of their food is still provided, but they have to work much harder to get it: It has been placed in trees, not simply left on the ground.

Some of her center's orangutans, Droescher-Nielsen said, have scant chance of surviving in the wild, so they will have to stay put until they die. This could mean decades, as the animal's average life expectancy is 40 to 45 years. Those likely to stay include the blind, the maimed and apes "just too plain stupid to make it."

Some question whether protecting apes in captivity will contribute to the long-term survival of the species. Rescuing baby orangutans is a "welfare issue, but it is not good for conservation," said John Burton, head of World Land Trust, a British conservation group. He's against returning orangutans that might be carrying human diseases to the forest and thinks that keeping them in expensive rehabilitation centers is "not cost-effective" as it only adds to a "world surfeit of captive orangutans." The main focus, he said, should be on protecting forests and the wild apes that live in them.

Droescher-Nielsen agrees that the fundamental problem is the destruction of trees. But she also says humans must take responsibility for the havoc they've already caused.

"I don't look at this with my brain. I look at it with my heart. I cannot leave these victims," she said. "We're the cause of their becoming orphans. What should we do, just euthanize them? Should we just kill them and say, 'I don't really care?' "

Staff photographer Linda Davidson contributed to this report.

Indonesia’s rainforests recover from deforestation due to illegal logging - Trends Updates

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More than 70 percent of Indonesia’s original forest cover has been lost. Logging, which is mostly illegal, is estimated to destroy over 2.4 million hectares per year.

Re-elected Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) gets international praise for leading the fight against deforestation in his country. All Indonesian presidents in the past have pledged to preserve Indonesia’s rainforests. What makes Yudhoyono different is that, unlike his predecessors, he has taken strong steps to keep his promise. One of his flagship projects is Operation Sustainable Forestry which was launched in 2005.

According to one veteran travel organizer, “Illegal logging decreased rapidly the first year SBY was in power. Powerful people, including government officials, were sent to jail for their roles in deforestation.”

Indonesia’s military has long been suspected of having ties with illegal loggers. Yudhoyono, a former general, has asserted greater civilian control over the military, particularly regarding illegal logging.

Logging concessions in Sebangau National Park, one of Kalimantan’s most infamous illegal logging areas, ended in 1990, yet there were 147 sawmills still operating as late as 2001. Illegal logging requires heavy investments in Indonesia. Loggers had also built extensive networks of canals to transport cut timber, making the lowland peat forest area more susceptible to burning.

Staunch environmentalist groups such as the WWF have always kept watch over deforestation in Indonesia. WWF has begun reforestation with corporate partners in 850 hectares of the worst hit areas of Sebangau, located just 45 minutes by speedboat from Central Kalimantan’s provincial capital Palangka Raya and believed to have one of world’s largest wild orangutan populations.