Peatland Protection in Indonesia: Toward the Right Direction?
As a country with an extensive area of peatlands, Indonesia provides abundant sources of natural resources and a vast amount of carbon stocks. However, the uncontrolled logging and the expansion of timber and palm oil plantations have changed Indonesia’s
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Peatland Protection in Indonesia: Toward the Right Direction? Andri G. Wibisana and Savitri Nur Setyorini
Abstract As a country with an extensive area of peatlands, Indonesia provides abundant sources of natural resources and a vast amount of carbon stocks. However, the uncontrolled logging and the expansion of timber and palm oil plantations have changed Indonesia’s peatlands into a source of disasters, that is, wildfires. For years, Indonesia has been accused of violating state responsibility about transboundary haze resulting from wildfires in peatlands. This chapter discusses recent legal development in the protection and management of peatlands in Indonesia and analyzes how regulatory measures addresses the issue of peatland rehabilitation. The chapter argues that requiring the water-table level of a minimum of 0.4 m from the surface is justified according to the precautionary principle. The chapter is also of the opinion that the recovery of peatlands needs to be conducted under the polluter-pay principle, leading to the use of strict liability against peatland draining activities. Keywords Logging · Timber and palm oil · Haze · Peatland · Legal development
Introduction It has been argued that annual fires that occurred in Indonesia have a great deal to do with lack of law enforcement and indicate inadequate government responses toward peatlands degradation. One could, for example, refer to Tan (2015, pp. 5–6, 9) and Nurhidayah et al. (2015, pp. 195–197), who argue that in the context of international law haze caused by forest and land fires in Indonesia has indicated a violation of state responsibility principle, namely the responsibility to prevent transboundary pollution from forest fires. Following the 1997 fires, Tan (1999, pp. 847–848) concluded that Indonesia violated the principle of state responsibility, and hence: …Indonesia is internationally responsible for the occurrence of large-scale fires and consequent transboundary injury to neighbouring States by failing to control the actions of its citizens within its territory. It first failed to prevent transboundary harm by not using its A. G. Wibisana (B) · S. N. Setyorini Faculty of Law, Universitas Indonesia, Depok, Indonesia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Djalante et al. (eds.), Climate Change Research, Policy and Actions in Indonesia, Springer Climate, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55536-8_15
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legislative and administrative powers to the fullest extent possible to prevent the fires from being started by the commercial enterprises. Once these fires had been detected and transboundary harm occasioned to the injured States, Indonesia further failed to control the actions of the commercial enterprises and to compel them to cease their harmful conduct. Further, based upon the lenient penalties imposed to date, it would appear that Indonesia has breached its responsibility to punish the offenders adequately in order to prevent future violations.
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