In a move that could be seen as a reflection of the Green New Deal policy that it launched last week, the European Union (EU) is committing €24 million to support groups working to combat transboundary haze pollution and peatland fires in Southeast Asia.
The five-year Sustainable Use of Peatland and Haze Mitigation in Asean (Supa) programme, partly funded by €4 million from the German government, will be crucial in mitigating the impacts of climate change and helping get to the bottom of fires that have plagued parts of the region, said the EU ambassador to Asean, Igor Driesman.
This year alone, fires in the region have consumed a total of 857,755 hectares, an increase from 529,266 last year but still dwarfed by the 2.6 million hectares lost to fires in 2015.
Asean secretary-general Lim Jock Hoi said in a statement that the 10-country group remains determined to address regional and transboundary haze issues. The Supa programme, he said, would help create a foundation of knowledge to help member states improve their capacity and regional coordination to manage forests and peatlands in a sustainable manner.
"The EU has been working with Asean for 10 years to address this issue," Mr Driesman said at a briefing on Nov 15. "This initiative is a new phase that makes the programme work in a triangular way since it now involves civil society groups in Indonesia and Malaysia, which will work closely with Asean to address the root cause of the forest fires.
"It is a bottom-up approach that involves non-state actors and it comes on top of a component of working with governments."
The civil society organisations taking part are World Resources Institute Indonesia (WRI), in collaboration with the Tropical Rainforest Conservation & Research Centre Malaysia (TRCRC) and the IDH Sustainable Trade Initiative.
"They will work on programmes such as making inventories of existing peatlands in the region, and with local communities and farmers, to determine what crops they can grow on certain peatlands," said Muamar Vebry, the programme manager for climate change with the EU delegation to Indonesia and Brunei. He said pineapple was among the crops that can also grow on peatlands.
More than 3,000 plant species grow in Southeast Asian peatlands including oil palm, which remains deeply controversial, in many parts of Indonesia. The peatlands also serve as the natural habitat of unique animal species from fish to and dragonflies and are estimated to store 68 billion tonnes of carbon, or approximately 14% of carbon stored in peatlands worldwide.
But massive deforestation, land conversion, logging, unsustainable land-use changes and raging forest fires have been degrading the peatlands, making them a major greenhouse gas source with an estimated 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted annually. This is almost equal to the total CO2 emissions from Germany, the UK and France in 2012, according to data from the Asean Peatland Management Strategy (APMS). Land clearing and forest fires in the region have destroyed more than 3 million hectares of peatlands.
Roughly 56%, or 24.7 million hectares of global peatlands are located in Southeast Asia, of which 70% are found in Indonesia, where the bulk of the Supa work will take place.
According to data compiled by the National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) as of Nov 6, forest fires in Indonesia burned a total of 857,756 hectares of land and forest from January to September this year, of which 227,304 hectares were peatlands.
The fires led to damages and economic losses estimated at US$5.2 billion, or equivalent to 0.5% of the country's gross domestic product, in eight affected provinces from June to October alone, said Frederico Gil Sander, lead economist for the World Bank in Indonesia, at a briefing on Dec 11.
The agriculture and environmental sectors accounted for more than half of the losses, because fires damaged valuable estate crops and released significant greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, according to the bank's Indonesia Economic Quarterly report.
Forest and land fires have longer-term consequences, since the production of affected commodities such as timber would need at least two to five years to harvest, and this could reduce economic growth by 0.09% this year and 0.05% next year, it said.
The World Bank also said that the recurring fires and haze have deepened the already negative global perception toward Indonesian palm oil, as indicated by "declining demand from European countries, as well as EU's plan to phase out palm-oil based biofuel by 2030".
The EU last Monday imposed definitive countervailing duties of 8-18% on imports of palm oil-based biodiesel from Indonesia for the next five years, to hit back at certain biodiesel-producing palm oil companies, which it says benefit from unfair subsidies.
Now that the EU has made sustainability a top priority with the launch of the Green New Deal, member states will be obliged to import biofuels that were sustainably produced in the countries where they come from, including from Indonesia, said Vincent Piket, the EU Ambassador to Indonesia.
"We have a situation where biofuels made of palm oil do not meet our sustainability criteria," he said last week.
The Indonesian government has decried Europe's "black campaign" against the country's palm oil sector and says it will continue to fight against the EU policy, which it sees as discriminatory. It intends to challenge the policy at the World Trade Organization (WTO).
But Mr Driesman said the EU "would not see this [Supa] programme as part of the palm oil debate".
He said he hoped the programme would spur Asean to become more resilient and proactive in sustainable peatland management, mitigating the impacts of climate change, managing the risk of wildfires and reducing transboundary haze through collective actions and enhanced cooperation.
"Although much has been achieved since 2015, to effectively implement the Asean Transboundary Haze Agreement, efforts to combat peatland fires and curb the negative impact of climate change have to be sustained," he said.