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.

Some rather grim images were sent out from our picture desk yesterday. Taken on Sunday by Ardiles Rante, they show the devastation caused by fire in the peatland forests outside Pekanbaru, the capital of Riau province in Sumatra. So that's another few thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide sent up into the atmosphere, and seeing photos like these make me realise our ongoing campaign to protect these forests from the ever-expanding palm oil industry is even more essential.

Indonesia: oil palm saplings are still replacing peatlands and rainforest

Cooking oil, chocolate, soap, washing powder, cosmetics and biofuels are just a few of the hundreds of products reliant on one key ingredient - palm oil. Demand for this versatile oil is rising rapidly. Today 80 per cent of world production comes from plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia. Palm oil is the leading cause of destruction in Indonesia, where it is spelling disaster for local communities, biodiversity, and climate change as palm plantations encroach further and further into rainforest and critical peatland areas.

These issues are meant to be addressed by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the self-regulating industry body created in 2001 to develop sustainable solutions to palm oil production. To date, despite seven years of existence, no "sustainable" palm oil has entered the market place appearing in products of its members (who include household names like Boots and BP). But that's supposedly now about to change as the first certified palm oil shipment from Malaysia arrives this week in Rotterdam.

Jayapura (image by sandranahdar, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0)

As I write this, I'm sat in a hotel lobby looking out on to a market place where women are sat on the hard tarmac, blankets with tomatoes, lemongrass, onions and chillies spread out before them. Towering behind them is the incongruous bulk of the local KFC and, although there was torrential rain an hour ago, the streets are bone dry. That's because it's very very hot which is not surprising when you're a few degrees south of the equator.

We're going to be a bit short staffed on the blog over the next couple of months - Jamie has joined our ship the Esperanza in Indonesia to help document forest and peatland destruction and collect evidence about the palm oil companies that are driving the devastation.

We knew the government's plans on biofuels were a bit of a mess, but figures released today by the Renewable Fuel Agency show just how bad the situation is.

First off, the agency reports that 80 per cent of biofuels used in the UK don't meet government sustainability targets. In fact several companies, including BP and Esso, admitted that they didn't produce a single litre of biofuel that met the government's qualifying environmental standard.

The Governor of the province of Riau on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia has pledged to halt deforestation, which could help protect Riau's vast peatlands and forests that store 14.6 billion tonnes of carbon. Just to give you an estimate of what that figure means, it's the equivalent of an entire year's greenhouse gas emissions for the entire planet. Moreover, aside from being an important carbon store, this area is also important for biodiversity and critical for the people that depend upon these forests for their survival.