Greenpeace volunteers constructing a dam to prevent valuable peatlands being drained © Greenpeace/Oka Budhi

Belinda, senior forest campaigner at Greenpeace UK, is in Indonesia at the Forest Defenders Camp, to witness first-hand the destruction of the forests and peatlands by the palm oil industry.

Indonesia is a mass of contradictions. Two days ago, I stood on a high plateau in the middle of a national park. In front of me stretched miles of virgin rainforest, stunning and luscious, the mist rising up from the canopy. The sounds of insects filled the air, aquamarine birds skimmed overhead and in the distance, the occasional cracking of a branch as monkeys swung through the trees.

Yet today, only a few hours' drive away, I stand in a barren, burnt, and devastated land. What was once part of the same stretch of tropical forest I'd visited earlier is now barely identifiable except for the occasional blackened tree stump. And the eeriest thing is the total silence - no bird calls, no insects buzzing, no chattering monkeys. It's a land drained and devoid of all life.

Last week, Jamie wrote about our Forest Defenders Camp in Sumatra, Indonesia: the frontline of where peatland forest is being cleared for palm oil plantations.

Well, this week our volunteers out there are busy trying to stop the destruction of an area of swamp forest. Working with local communities, they're building dams across the canals that are used in logging and draining peatland.

From our international site:

Thick layers of peat underlie most of Indonesia's swamp forest. Over time, the peat layer has locked up millions of tonnes of carbon. Once forests are cleared, peat swamps are drained and decompose to release the stored carbon as carbon dioxide. Forests are often also burned, prior to the planting of palm oil saplings, further compounding the climate problem.

Climate change and deforestation are inextricably linked. Forest destruction contributes around one-fifth of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions, more than the entire global transport sector, and the problem is so severe that Indonesia and Brazil are ranked third and fourth respectively in the list of top emitting countries, mainly because of deforestation.

It's against this background that our latest Forest Defenders Camp opened a couple of weeks ago on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, located on the frontline where the peatland forest is being cleared for palm oil plantations. Palm oil is used in hundreds of food and cosmetic products, as well as biofuels.