JAKARTA — In 2015, Indonesian forestry giant Asia Pulp & Paper announced it would retire thousands of hectares of its commercial timber plantation in Sumatra, with the ultimate goal of restoring the land back to the tropical peat swamp it once was. The ambitious project marked a notable shift in the forest management practices of APP, which had been heavily criticized in the past for draining and clearing large swaths of carbon-rich peat forests to plant the acacia trees from which paper, packaging and many other consumer products are made. Central to APP’s effort was rewetting: the company had dug canals throughout the peat landscape to drain the waterlogged soil. Now it needed to do the reverse, blocking those same canals to allow the land to once again retain water. And it seems to have worked, according to a newly published study in the journal Scientific Reports. Nearly a decade since the start of rewetting, soil carbon emissions have gone down, while native trees have sprung up, write the international group of scientists behind the study. “We demonstrate that restoration through canal blocking has led to an enduring rise in the water table and initial recovery of the former vegetation cover through the re-establishment of native PSF [peat swamp forest] tree species,” they write. And once the canals were blocked, they add, nature required little help from humans: “The only active interventions are [i] canal blocking for moderate rewetting that avoids inundation where possible, [ii] limited local removal of existing…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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