There's lots happening at our Climate Defenders Camp on the Kampar peninsula at the heart of the Indonesian rainforest.
Today, activists at the camp have been starting the process of damming drainage canals.
After loggers have taken out the most valuable trees from the rainforest, they build canals to drain the peatland that it grows on. The canals serve a dual purpose - they allow easy transportation of wood out of the area, and they also dry the ground out enough to be cleared to allow monoculture tree plantations to be established.
Unfortunately, clearing the ground usually involves burning off the wood that isn't economically viable to extract - releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. And of course, you can't just substitute plantations for dense tropical forests. They don't compare - either in terms of biodiversity and ability to support complex ecosystems and local people, or in terms of the amount of carbon they store. To compound the ecological disaster that begins with digging the canals, as the peatland dries out the peat oxidises - releasing even more carbon into the atmosphere.
That's why our teams are damming the canals - to stop the water leeching out of the landscape.
How's it going? Here's some updates we got through from the Indonesian team today. First - from Bustar, one of our forest campaigners:
With the Kampar river in front of us and Kampar Peninsula peatlands behind, this camp is a part of our international campaign to make sure that world leaders – including the government of Indonesia – listen to the urgent need to protect the world’s forests and to stabilize the current climate crisis.
Our Climate Defenders Camp was constructed in less than 20 days - and contains facilities to support all Greenpeace activities. We're using solar panels to power it all. Two communications and electricity experts, Tom and Geof, worked hard together to ensure these vital resources were available for our activities here - and to make sure we can send our message out to the world leaders and societies with regards to our livelihood on this planet.
Our camp is also outfitted with office facilities which allow Greenpeace staff to work, sleeping accommodation for up to 50 people, sanitation facilities, boat jetty and a small hospital for any emergencies. We're here for two months - and couldn't work here without this amazing camp!
Currently, the team here includes Greenpeace activists from countries like the Philippines, Thailand, Belgium, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Swill, Italy and of course Indonesia, together forming solidarity in protecting what’s left of the world's vital rainforests - to save the earth’s life.
- Bustar
We've also had an update from one of our activists at the camp, Peterri from Finland, who has been working on building the dams:
Preparations for damming work started one week ago by consulting professor Jonotoro - a biologist and peatland expert (pictured below). Together with him and his team from the university we placed water level measurement pipes to the community land. With these pipes we are able to monitor the water level inside the peat before, during and after damming. We identified a suitable canal for damming 9 km west of our camp.
During the following days we have been preparing our camp site and storage area for the damming work. We have been sourcing logs from local people and from sustainable sources. For one dam we need about 150 logs and 500 bags of sand. We have also cleared some logs and debris from the canal so we can transport materials to the damming site with a boat. The canal is only about 4m wide but the dam construction needs to be about 10m wide.
Today we received the first load of timber to the canal that we need. Most of the logs are 5m long each weighting about 80kg but there are also 10m long logs! As you can imagine - these are difficult to manoeuvre and working in 40+C temperatures is very demanding. At this time of the month we don't get proper high tide so we were carrying the logs 300m from the river to drainage canal. Hopefully the tides will work in our favour - since we need to transport a lot more materials during the coming days.
- Peterri
