Ecosystem services from a degraded peatland of Central Kalimantan: implications for policy, planning, and management

Abstract

Increasingly, landscapes are managed for multiple objectives to balance social, economic, and environmental goals. The Ex-Mega Rice Project (EMRP) peatland in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia provides a timely example with globally significant development, carbon, and biodiversity concerns. To inform future policy, planning, and management in the EMRP, we quantified and mapped ecosystem service values, assessed their spatial interactions, and evaluated the potential provision of ecosystem services under future land-use scenarios. We focus on key policy-relevant regulating (carbon stocks and the potential for emissions reduction), provisioning (timber, crops from smallholder agriculture, palm oil), and supporting (biodiversity) services. We found that implementation of existing land-use plans has the potential to improve total ecosystem service provision. We identify a number of significant inefficiencies, trade-offs, and unintended outcomes that may arise. For example, the potential development of existing palm oil concessions over one-third of the region may shift smallholder agriculture into low-productivity regions and substantially impact carbon and biodiversity outcomes. While improved management of conservation zones may enhance the protection of carbon stocks, not all biodiversity features will be represented, and there will be a reduction in timber harvesting and agricultural production. This study highlights how ecosystem service analyses can be structured to better inform policy, planning, and management in globally significant but data-poor regions.

Towards sustainable management of Indonesian tropical peatlands

“…We considered all primary forest as 'undisturbed natural forest' class and all secondary forest as 'disturbed natural forest' class. In addition, dry shrub, wet shrub, savanna, grasses, and open swamps areas are presented as 'degraded land' class (based on Law et al 2015). Agriculture areas for food crops are classified into 'dryland agriculture' class and 'paddy field' class, in which dryland agriculture class consist of pure and mixed dryland agriculture areas.…”

“…timber production, oil palm production, biomass production for pulp, paddy production, carbon sequestration, biodiversity habitat, and ecotourism. These selected services are the most relevant ecosystem services in Indonesian peatland (Law et al 2015;Sumarga and Hein 2014). The performance indicators, sources of data, and assessment methods for quantifying the flow of the six selected ecosystem services (excluding carbon sequestration) are described in Table 1.…”

“…Peatland areas with draining lead to abandoned areas, while peatland areas without draining remain as forest use areas. Shrubs, herbs, ferns or grasses are typically vegetation in abandoned areas which also categorized as degraded lands (Law et al 2015) and having none of services and absent of Non Timber Forest Products (NTFPs). Peat swamp forest areas provide services like timber production and NTFPs, carbon stocks, biodiversity habitat, ecotourism, cultural services, etc.…”

Restoration planning of degraded tropical forests for biodiversity and ecosystem services

“…As these areas occur mainly in severely degraded forests, the transfer of management would incur minimal forgone opportunity costs from timber harvesting, and this could mitigate potential opposition from largescale logging concession holders (Saragih, 2011). Inefficiency in land-use policies is not restricted to Paser District as it also occurs across Kalimantan (Law et al, 2014;Runting et al, 2015;. In reality however, changing land-use systems in the region would be challenged by current political practices, which puts great emphasis on patronage and favouritism toward elites, rather than fair and balanced distribution of benefits across stakeholders (Faisal, 2013).…”

“…While trade-off and synergy issues have been extensively discussed in the ecosystem services literature (e.g. Chan et al, 2006;Egoh et al, 2011;Howe et al, 2014;Law et al, 2014;Nelson et al, 2009;Runting et al, 2015;Venter et al, 2009a), these issues are rarely investigated in restoration ecology. My research has progressed the field of restoration planning beyond a static approach, which assumes the state of ecosystem services remains constant through time, to accounting for the reality that the delivery of services changes as restoration proceeds.…”