The ecological ruin of Kalimantan’s peat forests
By TOM ALLARD, KALIMANTAN
December 14, 2009 A BOAT trip down the wide brown waters of the Kapuas River and the canals that flow off it, crisscrossing the hinterland of Central Kalimantan, makes for a depressing tour. What was once one of the world’s great swamp peat forests is a tangle of weeds and burnt trees. The rich peat, one of the world’s great stores of carbon, is dry and crumbles at first touch, degraded each dry season by fires lit by local farmers. The mills along the banks of the Kapuas are testament to the ongoing illegal logging that is denuding the area of what trees remain. Even a rare sighting of a female orangutan cradling her baby in a small grove of trees by one of the canals fails to enliven the mood. She hollers in distress and throws debris at the passing canoes as if to condemn their human cargo for the destruction. Amid the ecological ruins of a colossally ill-conceived project by former Indonesian dictator Suharto to convert 1.4 million hectares of wetland forest into an enormous rice farm, the Australian Government has undertaken an ambitious effort to rehabilitate the land. … Communication efforts, thus far, are centring on encouraging farmers not to burn the land before planting, and building trust by advocating small scale income generating schemes. Even so, fires are an annual scourge. The peat smoulders for months each dry season, sending plumes of smoke across Kalimantan and up to Singapore and Malaysia. Only the monsoon rains can put out the subsurface fires. Illegal logging remains an ongoing issue, operating openly along the Kapuas River and fuelled by widespread corruption. …
