borneo climate change

It also means ensuring locals are well-informed about the restoration effort and directly involved in monitoring it. It is proper regulations, however, that have in the past several months become a key concern. If they do, researchers know the models are accurately replicating how climatic shifts in one region of the Earth affect other parts of the globe. Its all a deception, Suhadi said. But logging has destroyed large swaths of Bornean forest, often lowland forests that are rich in diversity but that are easier and cheaper for companies to access, remove trees and convert the land to other uses, such as oil palm plantations. There is no sustainability.. The last thing anyone expected from President George W. Bushs 2007 State of the Union address was a proposal for the largest-ever cut in the nations use of gasoline. Its not uncommon for Indonesian companies to use layers of subsidiaries to hide their connections to illegal palm operations. A worker on an oil-palm plantation on Borneo. Gelambong pointed to the long rows of names. Once its dried, its burned. With additional losses . In his role as liaison, Gelambong was also sometimes responsible for delivering the very gifts that local officials found so persuasive. Please note: This page has been archived and its content may no longer be up-to-date. Within 10 years, the country would replace 35 billion gallons of petroleum, or one-fifth of all the gas and diesel burned, with fuel made from plants. To create a legal basis for development, the Indonesian government established a commercial land-share system in the 1980s. That year saw an extremely strong El Nio effect, which brought dry conditions to much of Indonesia. Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription. His father, he told us, was a king of one of Borneos dozens of Dayak tribes, the sixth descendant of the sultan of Old Kotawaringin, and his mother came from a line of warriors who served in the Indonesian special forces. In 2007, flooding in Johor led to the displacement of over 100,000 people and RM 2.4. To win access to protected ancestral lands, the corporations promised schools for local children and wages that far exceeded those from harvesting jackfruit and jalut timber. When Nancy Pelosi took the stage, she looked back on the 2007 fuel-economy bill and biofuels mandate she shepherded into law. The country's 2018 palm oil concession ban took this a step further, and in 2019 its moratorium on deforestation became permanent. But because its the widespread conversion of the land to monoculture plantations that threatens the orangutan habitat, Dewanto has also become a de facto park ranger, policing the forest where officials dont have enough staff, or willingness, to do it themselves. Anyone can read what you share. The government's Peatland Restoration Agency and non-profits like Wetlands International and the Borneo Nature Foundation have re-wetted and restored hundreds of thousands of hectares of peatlands. (A Salim Group executive, Mark Wakeford, declined to comment about the Sintang companies. Many speciessuch as the Bornean clouded leopard, the proboscis monkey and several kinds of tree shrews and squirrelsare found nowhere else in the world. released its final rule in early 2010, it had made a complete about-face. Juliana Nnoko-Mewanu, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch who has researched expansions of palm oil plantations in West Kalimantan, has expressed concerns that the job creation law could make things worse by "curtailing communities' and environmental experts' involvement in environmental impact assessments [and] accelerating licensing processes for [oil palm] businesses". These soils are naturally wet, which keeps the peat from decomposing, but when forests are converted into palm oil plantations the peat dries out, leading them to rapidly degrade and release their carbon into the atmosphere. Glob. None of the old growth remained only charred stumps poking up from murky, dark pools of water. Regional convection likely decreased during Heinrich events, but other Northern Hemisphere abrupt climate change events are notably absent. A look at a distant mirror? Researchers at Columbia and Harvard later estimated that the fires led to 100,000 premature deaths. Indonesias peatlands alone (which are greater in size than others anywhere in the world except for those in Russia and Canada) now emit more than 500 megatons of CO each year, an amount greater than the entire annual emissions of the state of California. The only way to learn the truth of what was unfolding was to investigate it for themselves. 2020 WWF - World Wide Fund For Nature 1986 Panda Symbol WWF World Wide Fund For Nature (formerly World Wildlife Fund) WWF is a WWF Registered Trademark Creative Commons license. "A lot needs to happen for Indonesia to meet its 2030 [forestry and land-use] target," says Brurce Muhammad Mecca, an analyst at Climate Policy Initiative's Indonesia office. To support this, in January 2016 President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo created the Peatland Restoration Agency (BRG) and tasked it with meeting new goals to restore 1.7 million hectares (6,600 sq miles) of peatlands within concession areas (including palm oil plantations), and 900,000 hectares (3,500 sq miles) of peatlands outside of these areas by 2020. Borneo on fire - Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet News | October 20, 2015 Borneo on fire By Carol Rasmussen, NASA's Earth Science News Team The worst forest fires in nearly two decades are burning out of control on Borneo, creating the thick blanket of smoke in this Oct. 14 image from NASA's MISR instrument. A handpicked selection of stories fromBBC Future,Culture,Worklife,TravelandReeldelivered to your inbox every Friday. Kalimantan [the Indonesian portion of Borneo] is the lungs of the world, and I am worried we will lose the forest we have left." Jakarta's relocation is a stark reminder of the urgency of climate change. Climate change and deforestation in the Heart of Borneo could be a deadly combination new report warns. M. Erhard, Validation of species-climate impact models under climate change. When Wilmar said it would buy more than 200,000 acres in the states surrounding Gusti Gelambongs village, it was a signal for others, too, to rush in. The expected gains were enormous. estimated that just 110,000 acres of forest would be converted to cropland as a result of the American biofuels law, and almost none of it on sensitive peatland. NASA researchers say the accelerated destruction of Borneos forests contributed to the largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions in two millenniums, an explosion that transformed Indonesia into the worlds fourth-largest source of such emissions. Read about our approach to external linking. We need a fiscal incentive.. Science Editor: We saw great promise, Waxman told me recently, sitting in a glass conference room at Waxman Strategies, the Washington lobbying firm of which he is chairman. In 2007, he and other lawmakers were focused on the benefits of biofuels and the bridge they promised to even greener technologies. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe. Advertising Notice They also announced that Indonesia would convert more than 13 million acres of additional forest to industrialized palm production. The supposed carbon gains of plant-based fuels have to be offset, Searchinger argued in subsequent papers, by one of three things: reducing food consumption, increasing yields from existing cropland or most likely creating entirely new cropland, probably in the countries with the largest underutilized forests. A decade ago, the U.S. mandated the. The company accused him of embezzlement, and he was arrested in 2016. Uniformly, they insisted that Indonesia had learned its lesson and solved its palm-oil problem, that peatland bans were in full force. The BRG nearly met one of its goals, restoring 835,288 hectares (3,200 sq miles) of peatlands on state or community-controlled lands. 2023 Scientific American, a Division of Springer Nature America, Inc. The BRG and other entities tasked with supporting peatland restoration faced a huge challenge. Now they were fighting simply for the right to take back a small sliver of land to farm for themselves. Around the world, the oil from its meat and seeds has long been an indispensable ingredient in everything from soap to ice cream. issued its analysis of palm oil; it said in a cursory three-page draft rule that palm oil did in fact fall short of the E.P.A.s bar, because of its direct impact on Indonesian forests. Indonesians suffering from the effects of smoke inhalation were streaming into hospitals by the tens of thousands. We examine this problem in Borneo, a global biodiversity hotspot [5], using spatial prioritization analyses that maximize species conservation under multiple environmental-change forecasts. had overestimated the expansion of crops into tropical rain forests and said farmers were getting better crop yields off the same land than the models had acknowledged. He became the public liaison for Bumitamas local operations, a company called B.G.A. But the increased use of palm oil in food production was largely a byproduct of the increased fuel-oil production. Our captain slowed the motor and turned into a small tributary crowded with nipa, a stalky canelike plant that is a food staple for native people here, and from there we navigated into a recently dredged canal no wider than 10 feet. The reason for this was BRG lacked the legal authority to force concession holders to restore peatlands, says Purnomo. Borneos mammals are threatened by a one-two punch of logging and climate change, but only a small amount of additional land needs to be protected to safeguard many of the species at risk, scientists report today in Current Biology. We arrived at another plantation and stopped near where a stream coursed through the bog. But these fixes are not yet permanent. In early July, I traveled to Kalimantan to investigate rumors that large-scale illegal peatland logging operations were still underway. She is a contributing writer in science for Smithsonian.com and blogs at Wild Things, which appears on Science News. This image was acquired by MISRs 26-degree aftward-viewing camera, one of nine differently pointed cameras in the instrument. ", Palm oil is best known for its use in household products, but much of it is used to fuel vehicles (Source: Transport and Environment, Credit: Adam Proctor/BBC). Its latest project, begun in 2019, is working with 350 households in the province of North Sumatra to restore degraded smallholder palm oil plots around their villages. #borneobulletin #germany #redbrick #factory #cocoabean #shell #potential #counter #climatechange #biochar #greenconcrete #remove #carbon #CO2 05 Jun 2023 04:01:12 The last glacial period spanned from 110,000 to 10,000 years ago; during that time the Earth was colder and glaciers covered significantly more land. They typically make up around half of the country's total emissions, depending on the scale of fires in a certain year. Efforts to do land-swaps from peat or high-carbon land to degraded land haven't yet proven to have much impact, and canal-blocking and re-wetting on concession land has lagged behind activities on state-controlled land. He macheted his way through the nearby town of Pangkalan Bun, slaughtering dozens of people. When the dictatorship fell, an angry mob firebombed Salims family mansion in Jakarta, and the new government forced him to abandon dozens of holdings. Wrangling precisely how much palm demand resulted from using a gallon of soy for fuel, and how much rain-forest carbon, in Indonesia for example, might be emitted as a result, became a question that was increasingly influenced by political factors. The results of the research were published online yesterday in the journal Science. In theory, the system let villages sign over development rights in return for some part of the profit. We use cookies to analyse how visitors use our website and to help us provide the best possible experience for users. Extreme climate change leads to physical damage to crops, loss of harvest and a fall in productivity. But he is no longer so hopeful. In 2015, the fires spread out of control. Those glittering stalagmites, which have been forming for tens of thousands of years, are what provided Georgia Institute of Technology doctoral student Stacy Carolin with a way to investigate how rainfall in this region shifted when past climate changed. As plantations expanded across Riau, North Sumatra and Central Kalimantan from the 1990s, canals were built to drain the land, putting peatlands at risk. "We need to be cautious to see if there is a spike in deforestation," says Putraditama. The remains of an Indonesian rain forest that was cleared to make way for oil palms.CreditAshley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times. These are just people. This radiation dispersed into tropical forests as far as Sumatra and Borneo (Fig. Most of the plantations around us were new, their rise a direct consequence of policy decisions made half a world away. Each contained a list of signatures purportedly those of hundreds of villagers, consenting to let the microfinance corporation control their land and represent their views to the bank. That would take years. Dewanto had been here one month earlier and seen forest. Gelambongs company was owned by a midsize upstart named Bumitama, run not by an oligarch but by the grandson of a Chinese immigrant who moved to remote eastern Borneo and opened a grocery store in 1915. The maps had since been changed. Now the forest was gone. Exposed peatland can spew carbon into the atmosphere for decades, even centuries, after the land is first disturbed. We use cookies to analyse how visitors use our website and to help us provide the best possible experience for users. The other set is a series of rapid increases in the Earth's temperature known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events. For Indonesia, the E.P.A. to abandon its consideration of indirect land-use change, describing it as a radical approach that could hold American farmers responsible for business decisions made by villagers halfway around the world. Gelambong drove us out of downtown that afternoon, to the ramshackle waterfront port of Kumai. But as Indonesian palm oil began to flood Western markets, that is exactly what began to happen. This report indicates that if the island of Borneo continues at its current rate of natural capital loss through deforestation, it will be severely affected by climate change through the increased risk of floods and forest fires, human health impacts, changes in agricultural yields and damages to infrastructure. Credit: USDA Forest Service photo by Diego Perez Upon further scrutiny, it appeared that the two companies may indeed have been linked to the Salim Group. Climate alone threatens to eliminate 30 percent or more of the habitat for 11 to 36 percent of those species, the researchers found. Indonesia is rich in timber and coal, but palm oil is its biggest export. The emissions from travel it took to report this story were 0kg CO2. "Peatland restoration outside concession areas is mainly the responsibility of the government, while inside the concession it is the concession holder's responsibility," he says. This report indicates that if the island of Borneo continues at its current rate of natural capital loss through deforestation, it will be severely affected by climate change through the increased risk of floods and forest fires, human health impacts, changes in agricultural yields and damages to infrastructure. Now called the Peatland and Mangrove Restoration Agency (BRGM), it is tasked with restoring 600,000 (2,300 sq miles) hectares of degraded mangroves as well as a further 1.2 million hectares (4,500 sq miles) of peatlands by the end of 2024. "Stalagmites are a very interesting proxy because they can be very well dated and they can also be measured at high resolution to give us oxygen measurements that we can relate to rainfall," Carolin said. When the trees are cut down, most of that carbon is released. The deeper he got, however, the more he began to understand that many landowners werent being paid. | It will take a momentous effort from civil society, the government and the global community to protect Indonesia's critically important tropical forests and peatlands. There are thousands of plants, animals and other species packed into a space a little larger than Texas. If we ended the use of fossil fuels tomorrow, we would still face huge challenges in stopping climate change in no small part because of one very common household ingredient: palm oil. Within a few years, though, Salim had rebuilt his empire. As Searchinger watched Bushs call for an unprecedented increase in biofuel production, his hunch was that the biofuel balance sheet would turn out to be tragically shortsighted. Climate Change: Borneo ASIAN Geographic | AG 06/2021 - 151 With 222 species of mammals, 420 bird species and 15,000 types of plants, the forest of Borneo is almost twice as old as the Amazon Rainforest and has hosted an almost incomprehensible number of animal species for more than 130 million years. Its 1,100 square miles of peatland bogs are one of the last remnants of an ecosystem that used to dominate the southern coast of Borneo; Gelambong said its peatland bogs once stretched most of the way from here to Kotawaringin, two hours by truck. This version of the page will remain live for reference purposes as we work to update the content across our website. The uniformity of the world he was growing up in was striking, like the endless plains of drilling rigs in an East Texas oil field. Cobb, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech, is Carolin's Ph.D. adviser, and the stalagmite samples were analyzed at her laboratory. The switch to biofuels, the E.P.A. The phrases peatland and forest have distinct legal meanings in Indonesia, he claimed; not all treed areas are forests, and not all peat-filled bogs are peatland. By the time the E.P.A. Reducing the amount of forest converted to oil palm plantations can also help. Dewanto wasnt particularly surprised to find the devastation. Alongside the expiration of the moratorium on new palm oil concessions, it led to concern that the industry would expand onto forest and peatland. In perhaps the final turn of the life cycle, Indonesia is now working to become its own largest customer. Yet there was no mistaking that this was peatland: Paths submerged into black goop, teams of dragonflies swarmed over the hot water, reeds and forest grew from their depths. It was a rare coup for a layman peer-reviewed scientific journals seldom take an interest in the work of activist lawyers but Searchinger had done something important. The 2020 legislation on job creation raised alarm due to its streamlining of environmental regulations and changes which make land acquisition by corporations easier. Much of the new development was focused on Borneo, where many villages were settled before there were nations, let alone land deeds. There was scarcely any mention of peatland at all. They lobbied the E.P.A. As Cobb explained, the tropical Pacific, through phenomena like El Nio, plays a very large role in precipitation and global weather patterns like monsoons today. The American biofuels law, for instance, was designed to support soybean and corn farmers, not palm-oil producers. In 2014, Indonesias highest judge and three associates were convicted in a huge bribery scandal that journalists have linked to palm land deals in Borneo. Forest fires are an annual event in Indonesia sparked in the dry early fall as village farmers clear their fields and then extinguished by the monsoons. Susan Callery. In 2018, Indonesia implemented a ban on new oil palm plantations. The measure, as he put it, would confront the serious challenge of global climate change. Unsaid, but clear to anyone paying attention, was that it would also please Americas agriculture industry, which had been lobbying for ethanol and advanced biofuel research for years. Timothy Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton University, teaching a class on global land-use challenges. Find out more about how we calculated this figure here. Join one million Future fans by liking us onFacebook, or follow us onTwitterorInstagram. In September 2015, just a few months before the world signed up to the Paris Agreement on climate change, a number of huge forest fires erupted across Indonesian Sumatra and Borneo, darkening the skies across Southeast Asia and threatening the health of hundreds of thousands of people. And that analysis, which remains in draft form today, simply ignores the substitution effect which, calculated in any form, would suggest an even greater carbon cost. Kalimantan, Indonesia (CNN) Deep within the jungles of Indonesian Borneo, illegal fires rage, creating apocalyptic red skies and smoke that has spread as far as Malaysia and Singapore. How termites help rainforests survive climate change. A blanket of smoke covers much of the image, blowing westward with the prevailing winds toward Sumatra and the nations of Malaysia and Singapore. This was what an American effort to save the planet looked like. The palatial remains of Gelambongs family estate still stand in Kotawaringin, their wood grayed and weathered, ringed by a tall fence capped with elongated spikes that for centuries has turned away tigers and thieves alike. If anyone knows about this, it's Wetlands International Indonesia. In Jakarta, a string of officials from the government palm-oil agency, the Ministry of Maritime Affairs, the palm-industry association, the Peatland Restoration Agency all denied to me that peat deforestation in Kalimantan still took place. One of Indonesias largest conglomerates, the Salim Group which owns Indofood, the nations largest maker of instant noodles said it would pay $13 million for 200,000 acres in East and Central Kalimantan. Multiple images of the same region from the different cameras can be processed together to obtain estimates of the height of the smoke clouds, as well as the types of particles it contains. On top of that, the nine most recent years have been the hottest. The president was no climate champion he had backed out of the Kyoto Protocol shortly after taking office in 2001 but he did favor what he called energy independence. He had declared the United States addicted to foreign oil, yet dependence on Middle Eastern fuel continued. Sarah Zielinski June 5, 2023. The House chamber erupted in applause. In the lowlands, temperatures range between 25C and 35C, while at higher elevations things can get a lot cooler. And the typical analysis doesnt count the carbon produced by cutting down these forests or if that deforestation happens to take place in Indonesia emissions from disturbing the extremely carbon-rich peatland soils that much of the forest grows upon. Sea level rise is caused primarily by two factors related to global warming: the added water from melting ice sheets and glaciers, and the expansion of seawater as it warms. "I hope they can meet the updated goals," said Fadhli Zakiy, who leads the Peatland Restoration Information Monitoring System at WRI Indonesia. Dewanto couldnt get the scene out of his head. This report from the Great Apes Survival Partnership (GRASP) and the Liverpool John Moores University assesses the impacts of land cover change and climate change on Borneo's endangered orangutans. He was deeply uncomfortable and believed he was being followed. But the conference was light on substance when it came to the subject of forests. At its general assembly last year its members voted overwhelmingly in favour of a historical change: . The answer was unequivocal: Its what got Indonesian palm off the ground. The oligarchs had once brazenly plundered whole states, but Gelambong thought this time would be different. Almost everywhere in the world, planting more corn or soy for biofuel would involve creating more farmland, which in turn would involve cutting down whatever was already growing on that land. Waxman thought a biofuel requirement could be a turning point in climate legislation, a moment when Washington stopped pretending. It wasn't just a muted version of the Chinese stalagmites," Cobb added. By this accounting, vegetable-oil-based biofuel fares well against petroleum fuels, reducing CO emissions by as much as 80 percent. But it was also frightening. And conservation doesnt necessarily mean making land completely off limits to these companies. 11, 1504-1513 (2005). But it was the peat below the forests' surface that had the greatest impact on the climate. ), At the bupatis house, an elegant, 19th-century Dutch-built compound bursting with tropical flowers, I pressed him to explain how these peatland forests could be cut down when the government insisted that such land clearing had stopped.
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