PEKANBARU, Indonesia — Traffic stopped gradually, then suddenly, as the new year approached around an hour’s drive out of the city of Pekanbaru here on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Within minutes, the arterial highway linking the island’s east and west coasts turned into a dark river. “The problem is complex,” said Sigit Sutikno, a peatland hydrologist at the University of Riau. “The floods will become more frequent, the impact will widen, and the duration will be longer.” Across much of Indonesia’s Riau province, motorcyclists coated in translucent ponchos scrambled under shop awnings, while young children gazed out of car windows, unaware that the tailback snaked back for tens of kilometers. Sigit said he expects extreme conditions like Riau’s New Year flood to worsen even without the aggravation of rainfall patterns caused by climate change, which will bring more frequent extreme weather events over Sumatra. Dumai, a coastal city in Riau, is prone to wildfires. Image courtesy of Walhi-Riau. Thousands were caught up in the chaos on New Year’s Eve in Riau, which Sigit attributed to the deterioration of Indonesia’s largest peatland. The province, which comprises much of Sumatra’s Malacca Strait coastline, accounts for a wider expanse of carbon-dense peatland than anywhere else in Indonesia. The country as a whole is home to around a third of the world’s tropical peat, which accumulates over thousands of years from the incomplete decomposition of plants in waterlogged marshes. Peat accounts for about 3% of land surface area around the globe, but these…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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