By Hans Nicholas Jong

A study funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has concluded that Indonesia’s peat fires produced less greenhouse gas emissions than previously believed, a finding that could lower the country’s carbon-emission ranking.

The archipelago is currently ranked as the country making the third-largest contribution to global emissions due to the annual land and forest fires, especially because most of the fires occurred on carbon-rich peatland.

Peat forms in wetlands where wet, oxygen-poor conditions prevent plant material from fully decomposing. As generations of plants grow, die and then only partially decompose, with their composting matter piling up into a thick organic layer called peat, it acts as a carbon sink.

Indonesia is home to half of the world’s tropical peatland, the majority of it in Kalimantan. In the mid-1990s the government’s Mega Rice Project drained and cleared more than 1 million hectares of Kalimantan’s peat forest in an unsuccessful attempt to convert it for agriculture, which has led to widespread annual fires in the region as the carbon-rich peat dries out and becomes flammable.

Current estimates of the amount of various greenhouse gases produced by peat fires come from lab experiments, and on the basis of those, Indonesia’s fires make it the world’s third-biggest carbon emitter. However, the study, conducted by a team of Indonesian and American scientists, suggests that Indonesia’s peat fires may produce less greenhouse gas than previously believed.

Preliminary results from field measurements of smoldering Kalimantan peatland suggests that the fires emitted 8 percent less carbon dioxide and 55 percent less methane than were previously estimated from lab tests.

“Not all of the previous studies were based on field research. Many of them were based on extrapolation, which means that they just assumed the amount of greenhouse gases produced by peat fires based on research in one location,” a fire expert from Bogor Agriculture University, Bambang Hero Saharjo, who is also a member of the research team, said.

Furthermore, the team of scientists found that there were errors in the previous studies on emissions from peat fires.

“Many of the studies generalized the depth of the peatland to 50 centimeters. But the facts on the ground are not like that because there are many peat areas that are still rich in water and thus were not burned,” he said.

Realizing that there might have been a miscalculation of the actual emissions produced by Indonesia’s peat fires, Indonesian scientists decided to team up with their colleagues from America.

“So last year we conducted research in Central Kalimantan on various types of land use during the fires,” said Bambang.

To obtain a more accurate, field-based analysis of the smoke’s components, the team of scientists imported a portable infrared spectrometer and other equipment into Indonesia from the US. They took the spectrometer, also used in research on Mars, out into still smoldering peatland, where they collected samples of the smoke and analyzed its makeup.

“If this result is compared with the calculations made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] there is a significant difference,” Bambang said.

The team of scientists plan to make a funding proposal to NASA to conduct similar research in Riau, Jambi and Papua.

The Indonesian government is considering including the results of the study into the country’s official greenhouse gas emissions calculation.

“We could use this as the basis of our greenhouse gas emissions calculation,” Environment and Forestry Ministry climate change mitigation director Emma Rachmawati said.