Optimizing the Multifunctionality of Tropical Peatland Ecosystem

Ecosystem Services (ES) study, which initially intended to capture externalities produced by economic activity, currently has been developed and expanded into numerous global frameworks. The multidimensional approach made the ES study applicable to a wide-ranging ecosystem, including peatland. While abundant research on spatial peatland ES has been carried out, only a fewest that attempted to use common drivers in deriving multiple ES. This study set out to value and map four peatland ES: provisioning, carbon regulating, water storage, and fire prevention services, using the common driver of land cover and peatland soil moisture. We exclusively apply the ES mapping concept to the status quo condition (2017), regional spatial planning (RTRW), and Indonesia’s Long Term Strategy (LTS) scenario for the peatland ecosystem unit of Gaung-Batang Tuaka KHG in Riau, Indonesia. Our results revealed provisioning services were at the highest to be produced under the RTRW scenario, particularly in the cultivation zone, with an additional USD 37.03 million in benefits for provisioning services compared to the status quo. However, the RTRW scenario failed to increase the carbon services, both in the ecological zones for cultivation and protection. For the Indonesia LTS scenario, immediate restoration using peat native commodity potentially add benefit from provisioning services amounted to USD 9.23 million while generating lower total emissions. However, spatially, negative carbon services were still dominating the study area in all three scenarios, which indicates ecosystem failure to regulate carbon. Omitting the peat subsidence factor, both RTRW and LTS scenarios are able to increase water storage services, while for the fire prevention services, changes in future rainfall due to climate change cause an increasing peatland burning area. While ecologically the LTS scenario performs the most optimum condition for both market and non-market benefit, the current system of valuing environmental benefits that neglects other essential ES beyond carbon is not aligned with the country's attempt to decarbonize the land sector.