Katingan Peatland Restoration and Conservation
Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan) harbors 5.7 million hectares of peatland. The project, situated within this region, safeguards and restores 149,800 hectares of peatland ecosystems, including one of Indonesia's largest intact peat swamp forests. Additionally, it prevents the conversion of the project area, located in a state-designated production forest, into fast-growing industrial pulpwood plantations. Legal control secured through an Ecosystem Restoration Concession license blocks the applications of plantation companies, ensuring the preservation of this vital ecosystem.
Verra is a leading global standards organisation that develops and manages frameworks to measure, track, and certify various environmental and social impacts. Their flagship program, the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS), is one of the world’s most widely used voluntary carbon market standards, ensuring that carbon credits represent real, additional, and permanent emission reductions.
This initiative brings about a range of sustainability benefits, extending beyond just preventing carbon release from the project area's carbon stocks.
Kalimantan spans approximately 5.7 million hectares of peatland, and by 2020, the expansion of industrial plantations in this region alone is estimated to contribute to about 20% of Indonesia's total greenhouse gas emissions.
Within the project area, substantial amounts of CO2 are stored, with above-ground biomass and peat carbon stocks measured at 14.25 million tons and 546.75 million tons of carbon, respectively.
The project is instrumental in stabilizing water flows, averting destructive peat fires, enhancing soil nutrients, and ensuring a clean water supply. The region boasts rich biodiversity, housing significant populations of high conservation value species, including some of the world's most endangered, such as the Bornean Orangutan and Proboscis Monkey.
While the project area itself lacks permanent human settlements, it is surrounded by villages that rely on it to support traditional livelihoods like farming, fishing, and harvesting non-timber forest products.
The diverse forest habitat sustains two critically endangered, eleven endangered, and thirty-one vulnerable species. Preliminary estimates indicate nearly 4,000 Orangutans, almost 10,000 Bornean Gibbons, and over 500 Proboscis Monkeys within the area, representing over 5% of the remaining global population of these species.
In total, the project area's biodiversity encompasses 157 bird, 67 mammal, 41 reptile, 8 amphibian, 111 fish, and 314 floral species.
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