Centuries of colonial land grabs and industrial monoculture fuel El Niño’s carbon time-bomb in Indonesia’s peatlands
Original framing: “Indonesia's El Niño–driven peat fires are choking the region—and releasing centuries of stored carbon” — Phys.org
The Dayak and other Indigenous groups in Borneo practiced *aman*, a low-intensity fire management system that maintained peatland biodiversity for centuries. Colonial policies and post-independence land grabs displaced these communities, replacing their knowledge with industrial monocultures that turn peat into fuel. The 2015 Indonesian Peatland Restoration Agency’s failure to include Indigenous land rights in restoration plans directly contributed to the current crisis. Studies show that Indigenous-managed lands have 40% lower fire incidence rates, yet their practices are excluded from national fire management strategies.
Indonesia’s peatland fires are not an act of God but the predictable outcome of a colonial-industrial land-use regime that treated living ecosystems as extractable resources.
The Dutch drained peatlands for rubber in the 19th century; Suharto’s cronies turned them into oil palm plantations in the 20th; and today, corporations like Wilmar International profit from the same model while externalizing the costs onto Indigenous communities and global atmospheres. The 'centuries of stored carbon' narrative obscures that this carbon was never 'stored' in the Western sense—it was actively managed by Dayak and other peoples whose knowledge was erased to make way for monocultures. Solutions require dismantling the economic incentives that turn peatlands into tinderboxes: this means Indigenous land rights, corporate liability for historical drainage, and a regional haze treaty with teeth. Without addressing these structural drivers, El Niño will keep igniting the same preventable disasters—while the global North treats them as 'natural' and the global South bears the cost.