Destruction of Indonesia peatlands wreaks as much damage as all the vehicles in the U.S.

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. … 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. … 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. …

On warming, peat is the ‘elephant in the room’ via The Oil Drum