Abstract
Economically, peatland plays an important role since they can be reclaimed for agriculture. Shallow peat (<100 cm) can be used to grow food crops including vegetables. Peatland has also become attractive for development of large-scale oil palm and rubber plantations. However, peatland has a number of constraints in terms of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission, especially CO2 emissions in the degraded peatland. These arise from decomposition of peat. Common sense suggests three alternatives to manage GHG emissions from degraded peatland: conservation and restoration, natural recovery, and agricultural use. In this context, the challenge is to utilize degraded tropical peatland for agriculture while avoiding the negative impacts, and ensuring its environmental sustainability. This research attempts to contribute toward developing better management plans. Results of this study show that rice farming has highest sustainable score in degraded peatland. Rice farming secured a 52.14% sustainability score, while oil palm and rubber farming exhibited 47.55 and 47.67% sustainable scores, respectively. Therefore, rice farming can be considered as the first alternative for development of degraded peatland. Improved oil palm and rubber farming systems may also be subsequently considered if their sustainability can be improved.
Highlights
Indonesia has approximately 14.9 million hectares of peatlands (Mulyani 2012) which equal to 80% of peatland in South East Asia and 50% of the globally tropical peatland (Page et al 2011)
Higher scores for rice, oil palm and rubber farming were found in the social dimension
The result of sustainability assessment of peatland farming systems is only indicative of relative sustainability since the analysis is strongly affected by the choice of attributes
Summary
Indonesia has approximately 14.9 million hectares of peatlands (Mulyani 2012) which equal to 80% of peatland in South East Asia and 50% of the globally tropical peatland (Page et al 2011). Indiscriminant exploitation of peatland with improper management such as logging activities, conversion to plantations, and expansion of small-holder agriculture has caused degraded peatland (Silvius and Diemont 2007). Peatland plays an important role since they can be reclaimed for agriculture. Shallow peat (
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