Abstract
Important peatland issues developed were how to restore peatlands and followed by increasing rural livelihoods. This research aimed to analyze how peatlands can be utilized to alleviate poverty? and how to integrate peatland restoration with poverty alleviation. This research has been conducted in peatlands of OKI district, South Sumatra Indonesia in 2017. Data about bio geophysical aspects of peatlands, social, economic and political institutions of farmers were surveyed in the fields, performed in qualitative and quantitative approach, and analyzed in forms of tables and descriptions. Important themes have been discussed in formulating popular policies for peat restoration based on livelihoods of local farmers, among others poor groups; characteristics of farmers from the socio-political aspect; concept of peatland restoration and other lessons-learnt; compatibility of peat-based poverty alleviation; and need to improve policy making. The chronic poor sites tend to overlap with peatland degradation; it is more important to cultivate peatlands to prevent farmers from falling into deeper poverty than to reduce farmers out of poverty, and the intrinsic quality of peatlands and their contents tends to conflict with poverty alleviation goals, but there are some possible trends to minimize peatlands degradation and to alleviate poverty simultaneously. The best approach is to apply the 'win-lose' or 'lose-win' approach, even though we are not able to avoid peatland degradation at a zero level, but at least it can be inhibited. Cooperation between investors and farmers in managing peatlands is needed, so that the peatland resources are not completely degraded.
Highlights
The government as a regulator in 2014 appeared Government Regulation Nr 71/2014 on the protection and management of peatland ecosystems, but farmers do not pay serious attention to the regulation (Armanto et al, 2017b)
Land clearing by farmers living on surrounding peatlands is often done without good planning, which leads to inequality in land use, for example land clearing by burning and illegal logging (Armanto & Wildayana, 2016; Ningsih et al, 2017)
The question is whether peatlands can be utilized to improve employment and income effectively in order to alleviate poverty? If it is possible, the increase in income of households is done without the peatland degradation that is difficult to restore? The important themes discussed are namely livelihood patterns of households on peatlands; poverty group in the research area; characterizing social-political farmers living in peatlands; concept of peatland restoration and other lessons-learnt; peatlands-based poverty alleviation compatibility; and the need to improve policy solutions
Summary
The government as a regulator in 2014 appeared Government Regulation Nr 71/2014 on the protection and management of peatland ecosystems, but farmers do not pay serious attention to the regulation (Armanto et al, 2017b). Peatlands are degraded due to peat subsidence, causing the area around the peatland dome is subjected to floods This is exacerbated by the shrinking of economic resources that can be utilized by communities in the peatlands (Adriani & Wildayana, 2015). Poverty vulnerability causes farmers to stay pushed back to clear land without good planning (Wildayana et al, 2017; Lu, 2017) This cycle is used by the community in the use of peatlands. Peat utilization often ignores land security rules where logging and land clearing are done by burning This causes the fire to spread to other areas and make forest fires become massive (Wildayana, 2017; Udoh et al, 2017)
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