The majority of regions in Riau Province are coastal areas and many communities live on land that is dominated by peat. Peat ecosystems have unique characteristics, as they are classified as wetland areas, while also possessing regions of terrestrial land. Poor maintenance of these ecosystems can cause a variety of issues such as forest fires, drought, flooding, biodiversity loss, increasing emissions, climate change, and social community changes. The purpose of this paper is to formulate a model of peatland utilization based on local wisdom and community welfare, in an effort to support the sustainable management of peat ecosystems in Riau Province. The main commodities of the coastal community are agriculture, coconut, rubber, oil palm, sago, coffee, cocoa, areca nut. Therefore, an understanding of the use of peatlands is needed. This is to prevent damage to the peatland ecosystem, maintain biodiversity, store carbon, produce oxygen, and manage water. Policies and strategies for managing the peat ecosystem are carried out through the development of socio-economic and community culture to realize people's welfare based on local wisdom. The management and use of peatlands have contributed to the economy, even as the main source of livelihood for coastal communities. Utilization of peatlands based on local wisdom can maintain a sustainable peat ecosystem.

Oil palm plantations at peatland are faced with problems of land degraded, low productivity and produced to green house gas (GRG) emission. The objectives of this study were to land clearing effect of peatlands and to identified factors that affect the peatlands in the biophysical characteristics. This study was conducted on District Bengkalis-Riau at marine and brakish peat. The data was collected using field survey and documentation. The descriptive analysis was used to determine biophysical characteristics and linier regresion was used to corelation perform important factors. The research results showed that the biophysical characteristics of peatland experienced changes in the horizon profile, peat thickness, decomposition level, moisture content, ash content, pH, C-organic and biomass. The secondary peat swamp forest of biophysical characteristics have to different in the horizon profile, peat thickness, decomposition level, moisture content, ash content, pH, C-organic and biomass compared with marine and brackish peat.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the strategies for empowering rural economies based on oil palm in an effort to control the potential environmental impacts in the development of oil palm plantations. The research location in Riau Province area. The commodity of palm oil is the most popular especially in the Riau region. The area of oil palm plantations in 2001 was 1,119,798 ha, increasing to 2,503,566 ha in 2017 with an average growth of 5.16% per year. Other plantations such as rubber and coconut actually experienced a decline. The expansion of the plantation area is followed by an increase in the production of crude palm oil. The CPO production capability in the Riau region is supported by 261 units of palm oil mill (POM) with a capacity of processing 12,470 tons per hour. Oil palm plantation activities contribute to the regional and national economy. Oil palm farming has proven to be able to improve the welfare of the community and reduce poverty. The government has issued a policy, the development of oil palm plantations must be in line with the goals of sustainable development (SDGs).

The challenge of complexity environmental problems requires intensive efforts by environmental education. However, students’ environmental knowledge about of the surrounding local potential is low. It is necessary to integrated implementation of environmental education based local potentials to enhance students’ environmental knowledge. This research was conducted on students at Teaching and Education Faculty, Universitas Riau in August-December 2018. Implementation of environmental education based local potentials was carried out in learning with integrating contents of environmental education curriculum is the concept of ecosystems, environmental problems and environmental management based local wisdom, with data and field facts owned by Riau Province. Implementation is carried out in control and experimental classes, selected based on the homogeneity and normality values of the students’ environmental knowledge. Parameters analyzed were the learning feasibility value by observer and student’s environmental knowledge. Results showed that implementation of environmental education based local potential was very good (0.96-1.00). Implementation learning can increased students’ environmental knowledge by 0.60 (moderate), better than control class by 0.21 (low). So that implmentation of environmental education based local potential can be used as an alternative effort to improve students’ environmental knowledge.

Oil palm is a very common commodity in rural communities of Sumatra and Kalimantan, Indonesia, and the farming activities in these areas create a high multiplier effect and increase welfare. However, the expansion of oil palm areas puts pressure on forests and resources. The research was carried out through a survey using the developmental research method. Efforts to implement sustainable development in the plantation sector need to be carried out to develop palm in the second cycle. One of the efforts is to implement agroforestry by planting forestry plants between oil palm trees, namely meranti trees (Shorea leprosula Miq). The model for the development of meranti is a monoculture palm plantation that is integrated with meranti trees. This has ecological, economic, and social benefits, following the basic concepts of environmental management. Planting copper meranti between palm trees has multiple benefits for the community, such as wood production. Planting copper meranti between oil palm trees has multiple benefits for the community, timber production as additional income for farmer families.

Siak regency, Indonesia, has more than two hundred-thousand-hectare mangrove areas. Local community for all this time has been developed mangrove areas as ecotourism, but they still lack sustainable management to maintain it. Therefore, this study aims to promote strategies' policy for the sustainable management of mangrove ecotourism in the Siak regency. The research was conducted from July 2019 to July 2020 at 3 locations of mangrove ecotourism, which involved 30 respondents, consisting of 21 people to assess the SWOT analysis and 9 experts to assess AHP. For generating the sustainable policy strategy, A'WOT, a combination of AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process) and SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats), was applied. The SWOT data in mangrove ecotourism management includes strengths (2.797), weaknesses (-0.22), opportunities (3.668), and threats (0.149). The results showed that there were six policies needed to excuse. From these policies, the opening opportunities for investors for ecotourism development policy (0.243), improving facilities and infrastructure policy (0.194), providing business training on ecotourism policy (0.178), increasing ecotourism promotion policy (0.111), establishing cooperation between government and stakeholders policy (0.97), and maintaining mangrove ecosystem policy (0.79). It was concluded that mangrove ecotourism in Siak regency required priority funding to develop facilities and ecotourism's business training to cultivate sustainable management of mangrove ecotourism. Corporation between the government and stakeholders was needed to accelerate the realization of the policies.

Natural rubber has countless significant roles in human life. Rubber plants have the ability to maintain natural functions (they serve as carbon producers, conservationists of land and water, and habitats for wildlife) and they also produce many added values in terms of social and economy for rubber farmers or smallholders as well as become sources of their living and income. The price of natural rubber in the international market has significantly dropped in the last decade; leaving many rubber farmers or smallholders to live in poverty. Many programs to elevate the prosperity of rubber farmers or smallholders have been created and applied by the government of Indonesia but none of the programs has been deemed successful according to the analysis results of Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS), the sustainable ecological index (52.95%), technological sustainability (62.35%), economical sustainability (60.18%), social sustainability (53.62%), and institutional sustainability (20.73%). The institutional management of rubber farmers is highly expected to increase the development of rubber farmers so that each and every one of them may have high competitiveness which in turn will sustainably improve their prosperity in the future.

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