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Letters to Nature

Nature 420, 61-65 (7 November 2002) | doi:10.1038/nature01131; Received 20 March 2002; Accepted 17 September 2002

The amount of carbon released from peat and forest fires in Indonesia during 1997

Susan E. Page1, Florian Siegert2,3, John O. Rieley4, Hans-Dieter V. Boehm3, Adi Jaya5 & Suwido Limin5

  1. Department of Geography, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK
  2. Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität München, Biology Department II, Luisenstrasse 14, D-80333 München, Germany, and Remote Sensing Solutions GmbH, Woerthstrasse 49, D-81667 München, Germany
  3. Kalteng Consultants, Kirchstockacher Weg, 81663 München, Germany
  4. School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK
  5. Centre for International Co-operation in Management of Tropical Peatland, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Palangka Raya, Palangka Raya 73112, Indonesia

Correspondence to: Susan E. Page1 Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to S.E.P. (e-mail: Email: sep5@le.ac.uk).

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Tropical peatlands are one of the largest near-surface reserves of terrestrial organic carbon, and hence their stability has important implications for climate change1, 2, 3. In their natural state, lowland tropical peatlands support a luxuriant growth of peat swamp forest overlying peat deposits up to 20 metres thick4, 5. Persistent environmental change—in particular, drainage and forest clearing—threatens their stability2, and makes them susceptible to fire6. This was demonstrated by the occurrence of widespread fires throughout the forested peatlands of Indonesia7, 8, 9, 10 during the 1997 El Niño event. Here, using satellite images of a 2.5 million hectare study area in Central Kalimantan, Borneo, from before and after the 1997 fires, we calculate that 32% (0.79 Mha) of the area had burned, of which peatland accounted for 91.5% (0.73 Mha). Using ground measurements of the burn depth of peat, we estimate that 0.19–0.23 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon were released to the atmosphere through peat combustion, with a further 0.05 Gt released from burning of the overlying vegetation. Extrapolating these estimates to Indonesia as a whole, we estimate that between 0.81 and 2.57 Gt of carbon were released to the atmosphere in 1997 as a result of burning peat and vegetation in Indonesia. This is equivalent to 13–40% of the mean annual global carbon emissions from fossil fuels, and contributed greatly to the largest annual increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration detected since records began in 1957 (ref. 1).