Indigenous people

The earth is crispy around here. Crunch, crunch, crunch—my every footstep made a crackling sound like a rustling bag of potato chips. Underneath the crunchy stuff was something almost fluffy. “It is the dried peat,” Nizar told me. He’s been working in this area for decades, acrobatically transitioning between the local community, government and private […]

“We are fighting for our land in our homeland,” explained Emmanuela Shinta as she approached the front of the stage proudly at the Global Landscapes Forum: Peatlands Matter event in Jakarta, May 18th 2017. Shinta brought along the stories from the ground all the way from the western part of Borneo, to Jakarta, the busiest […]

By Gabrielle Lipton, originally posted on Forests News Indonesia – The sky turned yellow just before the 2015 peatland fires reached their height in Kalimantan, Indonesia. Then it turned dark, like a phantom’s mask covering the island of Borneo with thick, humid brown haze. The particles in the air were so dense that people’s eyes […]

How old is old growth in Borneo? 130 million years. Almost 80 percent of the island of Borneo was covered with this old growth rainforest in 1973. Today, only 28 percent remains. Barely bigger than France, Borneo’s rainforests are packed with more rare and fascinating species than almost anywhere else in the world. However, Borneo […]

“This is the perfect land—flat, fertile—all we need to do is drain it,” a farmer thinks upon approaching a peat forest. Draining the area turns waterlogged, carbon-rich soil into arable land, but in the process releases tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Only 15% of peatlands worldwide have been drained, but this alone is responsible […]

How the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) could bring a recently-discovered peatland into its REDD process By Bill Hinchberger, originally posted on Forests News Congo Basin – The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has long been known for the biodiversity and carbon storage capacity of its vast forests. Now, there is a need to explore the […]