Ecosystem services, degradation and restoration of peat swamps in the South East Asian tropics

Introduction The coastline of Sarawak appears to the casual observer monotonous and uninteresting. A coastal fringe of littoral forest or mangrove merges quickly into a flat plain behind which the inland mountain ranges appear in the distance. […][F] rom the mouth of the Batang Lupar to Kedurong Point – a distance of 200 miles – there is no high ground in the vicinity of the coast. Apart from the immediate coastal or riparian fringe, subject to regular or occasional inundation, the whole plain has been and still is largely covered in swamp forest growing on peat, recorded depths of which may exceed fifty feet. (Anderson 1963). Fifty years later this nearly untouched world in northwest Borneo no longer exists. Of Sarawak's original 1.4 million hectares of peat swamp forest, 80% is already lost. Most of the peat swamp forest has been drained and cleared to make way for plantations of African oil palm Elaeis guineensis to boost the production of highly valued palm oil (Wetlands International 2010; Miettinen et al . 2012a). This situation exemplifies the overall trend of peat swamp destruction and conversion in South East Asia. Of the original 15.5 million hectares of South East Asian peat swamp forests, less than 5 million hectares (32%) remains today, mostly in some state of degradation. Commercial and illegal logging and fire have affected nearly all remaining peat forests in western Indonesia and Malaysia, including conservation areas. There are now no untouched peat swamp forests and not one hydrologically intact peat dome remaining in Malaysia, Kalimantan and Sumatra (e.g. Silvius and Giesen 1996; Miettinen and Liew 2010; Wetlands International 2010). If current rates of deforestation continue, this region will lose its last peat swamp forests by 2030 (Miettinen et al . 2012b). The possible exception is the small state of Brunei, where most peat swamps are well protected. In Europe, the region with proportionally the greatest peatland losses worldwide, most peatland degradation took place over the past four centuries and halted in the 1980s (Joosten 2009b). In contrast, South East Asian peatland destruction is a very recent phenomenon that largely started in the 1970s and has dramatically accelerated over the last 20 years.