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How the media can help protect Indonesia’s peatlands By Rose Foley and Leona Liu, originally published on Forests News Indonesia – For some residents of South Sumatra, Indonesia, peat is a constant preoccupation. “Life keeps getting harder,” says 53-year-old Maemunah. She lives in Talangnangka village in the center of the province, among peatland that was once […]

By Douglas McGuire, Coordinator of the Forest and Landscapes Restoration Mechanism, FAO Ravaged landscapes, parched riverbeds and destitute communities. These are maybe not the first images that come to mind when you think about forests. But every year forests are being degraded and lost by an area about the size of Belgium. In fact, the […]

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 – For the past 360 million years, waterlogged land areas of our planet have been covered with the dense black decay of decomposed vegetation known as peat. Some peatlands have taken more than a thousand centuries to form, becoming the world’s most efficient carbon sinks. However, in […]

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 […]