Peatland stretches across approximately 8% of Indonesias land area. Peat fire disturbance, which affects the carbon dynamics of the ecosystem, will determine the countrys vision for a long-term strategy for low carbon development. While the impact of excessive draining on peatland fire is well-known to the scientific community, much less is known about peatland fire regimes in distinctive land management systems. We examined the effect of land use, land management, and climatic factors in peatland fires. The examination was performed at the Peat Hydrological Unit at Gaung?Batang Tuaka, Riau, Indonesia. We used a semi-automatic approach to determine the area of burned peatland and used a spatial analysis tool to analyze the spatio-temporal pattern of peatland fire in the region. Our results demonstrate an increasing trend of peatland fires between 2001 and 2020, with 33% of the burned peatland undergoing multiple fires. The bulk of the burned land was covered by either wet shrubs or estate crops, with the area of burned wet shrub-land cover was two times higher than the burned estate crop-land cover. Concerning peatland draining, this study found a positive correlation between draining intensity, as represented by canal density, and burned area in peatland forests. In managed and unmanaged land, canal density had no apparent correlation with the area of peatland burned; however, we found that the weighted area of burned peatland was, on average, seven times higher in the unmanaged area compared to the managed area. These findings urgently demand an increase in community participation in the utilization of unmanaged land and prompt execution of peatland rewetting in drained peat forests. While the government of Indonesia has developed a social forestry and agrarian reform scheme to enable the legal utilization of unproductive land in forest areas, we argue that greater impacts can only be achieved if environmental services incentive schemes escalate non-party actors participation.

As it is the main role to maintain hydrological function, peatland has been a limelight since drainage construction for agriculture evolved. Drainage construction will decrease water table depth (WTD) and result in CO₂ emission release to the atmosphere. Regardless of human intervention, WTD fluctuations can be affected by seasonal climate and climate variability, foremost El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). This study aims to determine the correlation between rainfall in Katingan and ENSO index, analyze the pattern of WTD fluctuation of open area and forest area in 2015 (during very strong El Niño) and 2016 (during weak La Niña), calculate the WTD trendline slope during the dry season, and rainfall and WTD correlation. The result showed that open area has a sharper slope of decreasing or increasing WTD when entering the dry, compared to the forest area. Also, it is found that very strong El Niño in 2015 generated a pattern of more extreme decreasing WTD during the dry season than weak La Niña in 2016.

The government of Indonesia, as a party to the UNFCCC, has committed to reducing its emissions unconditionally by 31% and conditionally up to 43% from the Business as Usual (BAU) level. Land Use Change and Forestry (LUCF) has been targeted as the main sector to meet this commitment, with a great contribution from carbon-rich ecosystems (e.g., peatlands). The sector is expected to reach about 63% of the target. Financially, participation from the private sector to meet the target is crucial. While abundant studies have calculated mitigation costs from the land sector, most of the studies were outdated, and the indirect and transaction costs are rarely taken into consideration. As we perceive such information as key for planning mitigation strategies, we aim to assess the cost required for the implementation of LUCF mitigation with the inclusion of formal transaction costs. This study uses the Comprehensive Mitigation Assessment Process (COMAP) model, an open spreadsheet model that captures both carbon and economic benefits from mitigation activities. The results showed that mitigation costs for the LUCF sectors ranged from the lowest of USD 10 to almost USD 3,200 per ha, with the most cost-effective options (USD per ton of C) being forest conservation and peatland management activities. To achieve the unconditional NDC target, the total cost required for investment and life cycle costs amounted to USD 11,229 million and USD 34,280 million, respectively, of which 53% of it expected to be provided by the private sector, while the remaining 47% from the state budget. The study found that mitigation activities by the private require higher life cycle costs due to a large portion of indirect and transaction costs that accounted for 10–43% and 4–19% of the total cost, respectively. Considering the financially significant contribution from the private sector to achieve the NDC target, and to increase the participation of non-party actors to the NDC target, this study proposes more policy instruments made available for cutting these formal transaction costs and to more diversify financing sources.

As a country with 14.9 ha of peatland, Indonesia is a major contributor of GHG emissions, especially from peat ecosystems. These emissions were caused by peat decomposition and peat fires. However, accurate estimation of peat burnt area was still a barrier that prevented the inclusion of peat fire emission in the document of Forest Reference Emission Level (FREL) as a followup document to REDD+ activities. This research has the objective to analyse two different approaches to estimate peat burnt area used in the FREL document and the most recent semi-automatic approach suggested by the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MoEF). The study focused on the Gaung – Batang Tuaka River Peat Hydrological Unit (KHG), as one of the KHG priorities in Indonesia. The results showed that the average total annual burnt area from the FREL approach was 58% higher than that of the semi-automatic approach, which could lead to an overestimate of peat fire emissions from this approach. The burnt area identified in this study was found to occur within the production forest area. As stepwise approach is allowed for FREL submission, improvements to a higher precision method are necessary to increase the accuracy of burnt area estimation.

Ecosystem Services (ES) study, which initially intended to capture externalities produced by economic activity, currently has been developed and expanded into numerous global frameworks. The multidimensional approach made the ES study applicable to a wide-ranging ecosystem, including peatland. While abundant research on spatial peatland ES has been carried out, only a fewest that attempted to use common drivers in deriving multiple ES. This study set out to value and map four peatland ES: provisioning, carbon regulating, water storage, and fire prevention services, using the common driver of land cover and peatland soil moisture. We exclusively apply the ES mapping concept to the status quo condition (2017), regional spatial planning (RTRW), and Indonesia’s Long Term Strategy (LTS) scenario for the peatland ecosystem unit of Gaung-Batang Tuaka KHG in Riau, Indonesia. Our results revealed provisioning services were at the highest to be produced under the RTRW scenario, particularly in the cultivation zone, with an additional USD 37.03 million in benefits for provisioning services compared to the status quo. However, the RTRW scenario failed to increase the carbon services, both in the ecological zones for cultivation and protection. For the Indonesia LTS scenario, immediate restoration using peat native commodity potentially add benefit from provisioning services amounted to USD 9.23 million while generating lower total emissions. However, spatially, negative carbon services were still dominating the study area in all three scenarios, which indicates ecosystem failure to regulate carbon. Omitting the peat subsidence factor, both RTRW and LTS scenarios are able to increase water storage services, while for the fire prevention services, changes in future rainfall due to climate change cause an increasing peatland burning area. While ecologically the LTS scenario performs the most optimum condition for both market and non-market benefit, the current system of valuing environmental benefits that neglects other essential ES beyond carbon is not aligned with the country's attempt to decarbonize the land sector.